Dean Wolcott pulled himself up. “What do you call him, Ojeda?” ’Rome Ojeda rolled a cigarette. “I call him ‘Snort,’” he said. “He mostly does.” Ginger’s suitor walked down the shallow steps and went up to the horse with outstretched hand. “Hello, Snort, old chap! Do you----” The animal pulled back sharply, flinging up his head with a sound vividly descriptive of his name, and ’Rome Ojeda grinned, enjoyingly. “Aside from that, he’s as gentle as a kitten,” he drawled. “Look here, Mr. Wolcott--where’s your spurs?” “Oh, I sha’n’t need spurs,” said Dean, easily. Just as Ginger had disliked his correct cousin in less than five minutes of acquaintance, so now did he detest this brown and beautiful ’Rome Ojeda with his appalling bigness, his flashing smile, and his crude sureness. He loathed the whole commonplace, rubber-stamp situation in which he found himself--competent wild westerner, eastern tenderfoot, cattle-queen heroine, mob scene of cow-punchers; it was like finding himself placed on the printed page of a tawdry story--like seeing himself on the screen in a cheap and stupid moving picture; like seeing himself in the rôle of unwitting comedian. He knew that, unescapably, he was about to be made to appear ridiculous; and that was a thing no Wolcott ever was. They had reverses, disappointments; they were ill, they suffered, they died; they were never ridiculous. And now Dean Wolcott, whose mother kept his Congressional Medal and his Croix de Guerre in the box with her delicate handkerchiefs, so that, with no parade of them, she could see and touch them every day, was about to afford rude mirth to yokels. He went again and firmly to his mount, clutched at the mane and the reins, got one foot into the jerking stirrup, scrambled and clawed his way up. The horse, simultaneously with these motions on his part, noisily demonstrating the aptness of his cognomen, did incredibly swift and sudden things with his head, his neck, all four of his legs and his torso. Dean Wolcott, just as the riders came loping up and Ginger stepped out on to the veranda with the packets of lunch in her hands, rose clear of the saddle, appeared to hang an instant in mid-air, sailed over the head of his steed and fell heavily to the sun-baked earth. CHAPTER V IT was thus that Virginia Valdés McVeagh, sole owner and proprietor of Dos Pozos, saddle-wise from babyhood, cool and competent as any man among them, presented her betrothed to the friends of her youth, to her world. Her betrothed, in those swift seconds between his departure from the saddle and his arrival upon the ground, hoped fervently that he might have the good fortune to break his neck, but it appeared immediately that he had not broken anything whatever. He was dizzy, jarred and bruised and lamed, but he was entirely intact, as he curtly made clear to ’Rome Ojeda. ’Rome Ojeda, his white smile flashing, was first to rush to the rescue.