"Why, hello, Jones!" Rob exclaimed. "When did you get in?" "Oh, a day or two ago." The man on horseback was small, slim and dark. A felt hat shaded his eyes. He glanced at Harriet and said quick and low to Rob: "Can I speak to you?" Rob went across the road. The man on horseback leaned forward and began to talk rapidly. Harriet turned her face away, but now and then she caught a word, a sentence: "if they get onto me," "my brand," "keep it quiet as you can," "I wouldn't say anything at all." And then in a natural tone the stranger said suddenly, "Well, see you later," and rode off. Rob came back, finished hitching, climbed into the wagon and they started. Harriet expected her brother to say something about the mysterious young man; but although Rob began almost at once to talk, asking all about their father and mother and the life at home since he had left and speaking freely about his own experiences through the past four years, he said nothing at all about the stranger. Harriet was unable to restrain her curiosity. "Was that a cowboy, Rob?" she asked. "Who?" "I mean that man on horseback who was talking to you." "Oh! That?" Rob hesitated. "Jones, you mean? He's a fellow I've met. He has some horses he wants me to take care of for a while." He stopped, then after a moment added, "If any one asks when I'm not home, just say I'm boarding them for a fellow." He stopped and after a few moment's silence began talking of other things. There was so much to see and so many questions to ask that Harriet soon forgot about Jones. They were passing through one of the irrigation tracts which marked the new development of the West. Wherever the sagebrush had been cleared from a new piece of land, lay the smooth, level acres: wheat, pasture, young orchard or stubble. The fields were all of one size and were intersected squarely by the irrigation ditches. The barns and dwellings of these ranches were always near the road. Built of new unpainted boards, and unshielded by trees, they glared crudely in the blazing sunshine. "Pretty good-looking ranches some of these fellows have," observed Rob, nodding toward a forty-acre stretch of young rye, green and flat as a billiard table. "But how ugly the houses are! And so small!" "You've got your ideas cut to fit the regulation New England colonial mansion, that's all. When I can afford a shack like that,--" he pointed to the two-room cabin they were passing, "I'll think I'm rich." "Bobby! The idea. Why, what do you live in now?" "A tent. I only filed on my homestead this spring, you know, and haven't had time to build. All last winter I was working for wages, feeding cattle for Dan Brannan, getting a line on feeding my own--and ever since I came in on to my land this spring after the break-up I've been so busy getting my springs fenced that I haven't had time to sleep scarcely. You can live in a tent for a while, can't you?"