Page:J Allan Dunn--The Girl of Ghost Mountain.djvu/57

Rh cooking for a ranch outfit. For one, you have studied English with excellent results. Not that I want to interfere in your affairs and, above all, I don't want to lose you as a cook."

Quong looked up, inscrutable, his well-shaped fingers gauging his work by feel, trimming, guiding the shavings of peel automatically into a basket.

"I have studied—much," he said. "As for cooking, knowledge helps all things." He indicated the pages he had been reading in the tattered cook book, sent with some baking powder preparation as advertisement. "And I do not consider the means that may lead to an end," he concluded.

Sheridan thought that he would like to know what end Quong referred to. Hardly a trivial one he fancied, as he walked off to get what he had started after, a coil of barbed wire. With it he rode away to help repair a reported break in the line-fence. The wiring there was comparatively new, and Stoney, restored to horse-duty, stated that it had been cut by nippers. The bright, clipped ends told a story that seemed to point to Hollister.

Hollister had a holding and he had a herd. He spent most of his time in Metzal and he had no outfit but a Mexican woman, her daughter, Juanita, and her son, Pedro. Yet his herd steadily increased. He had more yearlings, comparatively, to the number of his cows than any other rancher on Chico Mesa. They all bore the brand that Jackson had claimed as so appropriate for its owner—the Lazy H—and it was generally rumored that Hollister was lucky with mavericks." Sheridan was the