nevertheless was exceedingly wild, and the girl an extravagantly long
distance from home. "But Miss Edgarton--" he began all over again.

"Good-by, Mr. Barton! And thank you for going home!" she added
conscientiously.

"But what will I tell your father?" worried Barton.

"Oh--hang Father," drawled the indifferent little voice.

"But the extra horse?" argued Barton with increasing perplexity. "The
gray? If you've got some date up your sleeve, don't you want me to
take the gray home with me, and get him out of your way?"

With sluggish resentment little Eve Edgarton lifted her eyes to his.
"What would the gray go home with you for?" she asked tersely. "Why,
how silly! Why, it's my--mother's horse! That is, we call it my
mother's horse," she hastened to explain. "My mother's dead, you know.
She's almost always been dead, I mean. So Father always makes me buy
an extra place for my mother. It's just a trick of ours, a sort of a
custom. I play around alone so much you know. And we live in such wild
places!"

Casually she bent over and pushed the protruding butt of her revolver
a trifle farther down into her riding boot. "S'long--Mr. Barton!" she
called listlessly over the other, and started on, stumblingly,
clatteringly, up the abruptly steep and precipitous mountain trail--a
little dust-colored gnome on a dust-colored horse, with the dutiful
gray pinking cautiously along behind her.