artist to catch the full sunlight of midday, the camp of the Chavez brothers
gleamed softly in the magic light.

So far had spring roundup progressed that Luck was holding the camp in Tijeras
Arroyo for picture-making only. Applehead's calves were branded, to the
youngest pair of knock-kneed twins which Happy Jack found curled up together
cunningly hidden in a thicket. They had been honored with a "close-up" scene,
those two spotted calves, and were destined to further honors which they did
not suspect and could not appreciate.

They slept now, as slept the two camps upon the two slopes that lay
moon-bathed at midnight. Back where the moon was making the barren mountains a
wonderland of deep purple and black and silvery gray and brown, a coyote
yapped a falsetto message and was answered by one nearer at hand--his mate, it
might be. In a bush under the bank that made of it a black blot in the
unearthly whiteness of the sand, a little bird fluttered un,easily and sent a
small, inquiring chirp into the stillness. From somewhere farther up the
arroyo drifted a faint, aromatic odor of cigarette smoke.

Had you been there by the bush you could not have told when Annie-Many-Ponies
passed by; you would not have seen her--certainly you could not have heard the
soft tread of her slim, moccasined feet. Yet she passed the bush and the bank
and went away up the arroyo, silent as the shadows themselves, swift as the
coyote that trotted over a nearby ridge to meet her mate nearer the mountains.
Sol following much the same instinct in much the same way, Annie-Many-Ponies
stole out to meet the man her heart timidly yearned for a possible mate.

She reached the rock-ledge where the smoke odor was strongest, and she
stopped. She saw Ramon Chavez, younger of the Chavez brothers who were
ten-mile-off neighbors of Applehead, and who owned many cattle and much land