"Why can't we both ride?"
"We can as soon as we get across the pass. Until then I'll walk."
Erect as a willow sapling, she took the hills with an elastic ease that
showed her deep-bosomed in spite of her slenderness. The short corduroy
riding skirt and high-laced boots were made for use, not grace, but the
man in the saddle found even in her manner of walking the charm of her
direct, young courage. Free of limb, as yet unconscious of sex, she had
the look of a splendid boy. The descending sun was in her sparkling hair,
on the lank, undulating grace of her changing lines.
Active as a cat though it was, the cowpony found the steep pass with its
loose rubble hard going. Melissy took the climb much easier. In the way
she sped through the mesquit, evading the clutch of the cholla by supple
dips to right and left, there was a kind of pantherine litheness.
At the summit she waited for the horse to clamber up the shale after her.
"Get down in your collar, you Buckskin," she urged, and when the pony was
again beside her petted the animal with little love pats on the nose.
Carelessly she flung at Diller a question. "From what part of the East did
you say?"
He was on the spot promptly this time. "From Keokuk."
"Keokuk, Indiana?"
"Iowa," he smiled.
"Oh, is it Iowa?" He had sidestepped her little trap, but she did not give
up. "Just arrived?"
"I've been herding sheep for a month."
"Oh, sheep-herding!" Her disdain implied that if he were fit for nothing
better than sheep-herding, the West could find precious little use for
him.
"It was all I could get to do."
"Where did you say you wrangled Mary's little lamb?"
"In the Catalinas."
"Whose outfit?"
Question and answer were tossed back and forth lightly, but both were
watching warily.
"Outfit?" he repeated, puzzled.
"Yes. Who were you working for?"
"Don't remember his name. He was a Mexican."
"Must have been one of the camps of Antonio Valdez."
"Yes, that's it. That's the name."
"Only he runs his sheep in the Galiuros," she demurred.
"Is it the Galiuros? Those Spanish names! I can't keep them apart in my
mind."
She laughed with hard, young cruelty. "It is hard to remember what you
never heard, isn't it?"