“Come back home and take a squint at the cowboy D. has picked out for herself.” CHAPTER XXVII “IT’S ALL OFF!” By this time even Ned, dense as he sometimes showed himself to be, was aware of how things stood between the handsome stranger from the West and his cousin Dorothy. Ned’s heart was particularly warm at this juncture. He spent a good two hours every forenoon writing a long letter to Jennie. “What under the sun he finds to write about gets _me_,” declared Tavia. “He must indite sonnets to her eyebrows or the like. I never did believe that Ned White would fall so low as to be a poet.” “Love plays funny tricks with us,” sighed Dorothy. “Huh!” ejaculated Tavia, wide-eyed. “Do you feel like writing poetry yourself, Doro Dale? I vum!” However, to return to Ned, when his letter writing was done he was at the beck and call of the girls or was off with Garry Knapp for the rest of the day. Toward Garry he showed the same friendliness that his mother displayed and the major showed. They all liked the young man from Desert City; and they could not help admiring his character, although they could not believe him either wise or just to Dorothy. The situation was delicate in the extreme. As Dorothy and Garry had never approached the subject of their secret attachment for each other, and now, of course, did not speak of it to the others, not even Ned could blunder into any opening wherein he might “out with his opinion” to the Westerner. Garry Knapp showed nothing but the most gentlemanly regard for Dorothy. After that first evening on the ice, he did not often allow himself to be left alone in her company. He knew very well wherein his own weakness lay. He talked frankly of his future intentions. It had been agreed between him and Major Dale that the old Knapp ranch should be turned over to the Hardin estate lawyers when Garry went back West at a price per acre that was generous, as Garry said, but not so much above the market value that he would be “ashamed to look the lawyers in the face when he took the money.” Just what Garry would do with these few thousands he did not know. His education had been a classical one. He had taken up nothing special save mineralogy, and that only because of Uncle Terry’s lifelong interest in “prospects.” “I boned like a good fellow,” he told Ned, “on that branch just to please the old fellow. Of course, I’d tagged along with him on a burro on many a prospecting trip when I was a kid, and had learned a lot of prospector’s lore from the dear old codger. “But what the old prospector knows about his business is a good deal like what the old-fashioned farmer knows about growing things. He does certain things because they bring results, but the old farmer doesn’t know why. Just so with the old-time prospector. Uncle Terry’s scientific knowledge of minerals wasn’t a spoonful. I showed him things that made his eyes bug out—as we say in the West,” and Garry laughed reminiscently.