Manuela squealed with rapture. “_Mil gracias y gracias a Dios, Señorita mía!_” she purled. She had begged her mistress to leave off mourning, much as her Spanish soul approved it, and now she had her wish, and this bountiful precipitation of manna besides. She gathered it up gleefully and waddled off with her dark face creased into lines of supreme content. Ginger was very much pleased with herself. This was the way in which she--Ginger McVeagh--did things. She decided to lay off black, and instantly, with one gesture, she cleansed her wardrobe completely and forever of its somber presence. The next morning she was early on her horse and she wore her worn and mellow brown corduroys and her seasoned old Stetson, and Estrada and his men nodded knowingly at each other and smiled shyly at her. It was curious how shy and how respectful they were, the hard-riding, hard-drinking _vaqueros_. The Spanish and Mexican ones among them had a manner which was just as good and decidedly pleasanter than that of the other Mr. Wolcott, and the Americans, old grizzled chaps in the main who had ridden for her father, had a whimsical poise and a rugged picturesqueness of diction. It was an oddly feudal life for a twenty-two-year-old girl in the up-to-the-minute days of the twentieth century, the more so, of course, because of her brother’s death, but it had been sufficiently so, even before he went to war. Her mother had died when she was a baby, her father when she was a child; Aleck had firmly sent her away to boarding school three times, and three times he had weakly let her come home. He was bleakly lonesome without her; he concurred, in his happy and simple soul, with the ranchers who laughed and said--“Oh, let her alone--she knows twice as much now as most young ones of her age!” Family connections in San Francisco and Los Angeles protested mildly, but they were busy with their own problems and Dos Pozos was a marvelous place to take the children and spend vacations, and Ginger had probably had about all the schooling she needed for that life and that was undoubtedly the life she meant always to lead. Thus, comfortably, they dismissed the matter, and sent her an occasional new novel for cultural purposes and came months later to find half the leaves uncut. Ginger would have read it with a good deal of enjoyment if she could have stayed indoors long enough; evenings she was apt to be sleepy very early. Now the word went over the wide neighborhood that Aleck McVeagh’s buddy had come and brought a letter from him, and told his sister all about his life over there, and his death, and Ginger had given away all her mourning and put on her regular clothes and the ranchers rode over on their hard-mouthed, wind-swift horses or drove up in their comfortable, battered cars and asked her to barbecues and _rodeos_ again.