A board squeaked on the porch. Maw smiled, turned back to the stove and picked up the coffee-pot; hesitated, put up a furtive hand and pulled out the new teeth which she slid into her apron pocket. "Come on and eat your supper, Lark, before it's stone cold," she said in a relaxed tone. "I guess the gun cleanin' can wait; they're gone." Lark slid some more cartridges into the cylinder of the notched gun, slipped it inside his waistband and rose. "You got a case of smallpox on the ranch now; what you goin' to do with it, Maw?" he demanded querulously. "A gun fight I can handle; I was raised on 'em. But how do you expect me to live up to smallpox? Answer me that!" Then he observed a certain vacancy in Maw's smile and frowned. "Where's your teeth? Swaller 'em?" "No, I didn't!" Maw's leathery face showed a tinge of red. "You know as well as I do that I can't eat with them fillin' up my mouth. And as fer smallpox, how else you expect to keep folks from snoopin' around, lookin' fer that boy? Them men suspicioned you, Larkie, you know it as well as I do. It's a mercy I wrung out that sheet and hung it up--they heared the boy movin' around in there. Mebby you didn't see 'em wallin' their eyes that way, but I did. Lucky I could give 'em something for their pains of stretching their ears--you'd likely have two dead men on your hands to explain." "Feller knows where he's at when it's straight shootin'," Lark contended in a tone of complaining. "This thing of lyin' out of a scrape--" "I didn't lie, and neither did you. But I expect we'll all of us do some tall old falsifying before we're through. They ain't goin' to let the matter rest where it's at, Lark. You'd ought of thought about these things--Lark, do you s'pose them fellers will stop and quiz Jake about our Mr. Smith?" "My Jonah!" Lark ejaculated under his breath, and went out bareheaded to see for himself. He found Jake leaning against the shed wall with his hands in his pants pockets and his mouth wide open, laughing with a silent quaking of his whole body. He stopped when Lark walked up to him and pointed to where two horsemen were making one blurred shadow on the trail down past the meadow.