As softly as the caricatured tans would permit, Dry Valley tiptoed back to the gate and home again. Twenty minutes after the time appointed for the walk Panchita tripped demurely out of her gate in a thin, trim white lawn and sailor hat. She strolled up the sidewalk and slowed her steps at Dry Valley’s gate, her manner expressing wonder at his unusual delinquency. Then out of his door and down the walk strode—not the polychromatic victim of a lost summertime, but the sheepman, rehabilitated. He wore his old grey woolen shirt, open at the throat, his brown duck trousers stuffed into his run-over boots, and his white felt sombrero on the back of his head. Twenty years or fifty he might look; Dry Valley cared not. His light blue eyes met Panchita’s dark ones with a cold flash in them. He came as far as the gate. He pointed with his long arm to her house. “Go home,” said Dry Valley. “Go home to your mother. I wonder lightnin’ don’t strike a fool like me. Go home and play in the sand. What business have you got cavortin’ around with grown men? I reckon I was locoed to be makin’ a he poll-parrot out of myself for a kid like you. Go home and don’t let me see you no more. Why I done it, will somebody tell me? Go home, and let me try and forget it.” Panchita obeyed and walked slowly toward her home, saying nothing. For some distance she kept her head turned and her large eyes fixed intrepidly upon Dry Valley’s. At her gate she stood for a moment looking back at him, then ran suddenly and swiftly into the house. Old Antonia was building a fire in the kitchen stove. Dry Valley stopped at the door and laughed harshly. “I’m a pretty looking old rhinoceros to be gettin’ stuck on a kid, ain’t I, ’Tonia?” said he. “Not verree good thing,” agreed Antonia, sagely, “for too much old man to likee _muchacha_.” “You bet it ain’t,” said Dry Valley, grimly. “It’s dum foolishness; and, besides, it hurts.” He brought at one armful the regalia of his aberration—the blue tennis suit, shoes, hat, gloves and all, and threw them in a pile at Antonia’s feet. “Give them to your old man,” said he, “to hunt antelope in.” Just as the first star presided palely over the twilight Dry Valley got his biggest strawberry book and sat on the back steps to catch the last of the reading light. He thought he saw the figure of someone in his strawberry patch. He laid aside the book, got his whip and hurried forth to see. It was Panchita. She had slipped through the picket fence and was half-way across the patch. She stopped when she saw him and looked at him without wavering.