ailed firmly across the outside
kitchen door. Hammer in hand she backed away and read the words
judicially, her head tilted sidewise:

ONLY SNEAKS GO WHERE THEY ARE NOT WANTED.
ARE YOU A SNEAK?

The hint was plain enough. She took the hammer back to the shop and
led Pard out of the stable and down to the gate, her eyes watching
suspiciously the trail for tracks of trespassers. She closed the gate
so thoroughly with baling wire twisted about a stake that the next
comer would have troubles of his own in getting it open again. She
mounted and went away down the trail, sitting straight in the saddle,
both feet in the stirrups, head up, and hat pulled firmly down to her
very eyebrows, glances going here and there, alert, antagonistic. No
whistling this time of rag-time tunes with queer little variations of
her own; no twirling of the quirt; instead Pard got the feel of it in a
tender part of the flank, and went clean over a narrow washout that
could have been avoided quite easily. No groping for rhythmic
phrasings to fit the beauty of the land she lived in; Jean was in the
mood to combat anything that came in her way.

CHAPTER V

JEAN RIDES INTO A SMALL ADVENTURE

At the mouth of the coulee, she turned to the left instead of to the
right, and so galloped directly away from the Bar Nothing ranch, down
the narrow valley known locally as the Flat, and on to the hills that
invited her with their untroubled lights and shadows and the deep scars
she knew for canyons.

There were no ranches out this way. The land was too broken and too
barren for anything but grazing, so that she felt fairly sure of having
her solitude unspoiled by anything human. Solitude was what she
wanted. Solitude was what she had counted upon having in that little
room at the Lazy A; robbed of it there, she rode straight to the hills,
where she was most certain of finding it.

And then she came up out of a hollow upon a little ridge and saw three
horsemen down in the next coulee. They were not close enough so that
she could distinguish their features, but by the horses they rode, by
the swing of their bodies in the saddles, by all those little,
indefinable marks by which we recognize acquaintances at a distance,
Jean knew them for strangers. She pulled up and watched them, puzzled
for a minute at their presence and behavior.

When first she discovered them, they were driving a small bunch of
cattle, mostly cows a