Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/196

 said, but with a grin on her big honest mouth as she turned a roguish eye to Louise. "Somebody's got to help that red-headed boy out of his troubles."

"It isn't just what you could call red, Maud," Louise corrected, knowing very well that her face was positively so.

"Near enough to pass. He'll be down tomorrow."

"I don't know."

"Sure he will. He can take a hand—no, he can't, but he can sit in the hammock and hold yours. That'll leave me alone to work out my desperate scheme."

"How about Mr. Cook?"

"Mr. Cook?" Maud repeated blankly. "Who's Mr. Cook?"

"Why, the man you're going to marry! the baggage—"

"Oh, you mean Sam. He'll not be down; he's got his orders, straight from headquarters, to give me a rest for two solid weeks."

There was not much more of a road going down to Jim Kelly's ranch than a ship leaves after it on the sea. Every driver struck a course to suit his own pleasure in the vastness of that untrammeled country. Sometimes Maud followed where somebody else had gone, again she drove for miles where a wheel seemed never to have pressed before.

It was a broken prairie, thrown in easy-rising long ridges, gently heaving, like nothing so much as an ocean whose swells had been fixed by some strange caprice of nature in these grassy undulations. At a distance the