She heard Old John, the big plymouth-rock rooster, crow for midnight from his perch in the rafters of the stable—and again at false dawn a little while before daylight. “Well, I’d like to know what ails me,” she thought to herself as she got up with the first grey shafts above Mystery Ridge, “I never stayed awake all night in my life before.” It was indicative of the great good health and strength there was in her that she felt no ill effects from the unusual experience. She brushed her hair and pinned it neatly around her head in a shining coronet, put on a clean denim dress from the clothes-press in the corner, laced up the heavy shoes she had to wear about her man’s work, and went softly out to light the kitchen fire, to draw a fresh pail of water and to stand lost in rapt adoration of the pageant of coming day. She washed her face and hands in the basin and came blooming from the cold water, content with her lot, happy to be alive—and to know that Brand and Sonny Fair were in Blue Stone Cañon, and that they called themselves her friends. She had never had a special friend before—not since those far-back little-girl days in Missouri. “Mammy,” she said at breakfast, “I never slept a wink last night. I kept thinking about Sonny and Brand all the time—wondering why they’re hiding, and what relation they are, and why they live so hard and poor like. It seems dreadful, don’t it?” “Seems funny, if you ask me,” said Bud shortly, “maybe this Brand feller knows something of all this rustling that’s been going on up and down Nameless.” Nance laid down her knife and fork and looked at him. “Of all things, Bud!” she said, “it’s not like you to cast the first stone. And you’ve never seen this man’s face, or you wouldn’t say that.” “Well, I’m not so sure of it,” returned the boy, “I hate to see you take up so with a stranger.” “I trust your feelin’ for him, Nance,” said Mrs. Allison, “somehow there’s somethin’ in a woman’s heart when she looks into a man’s eyes, most times, which sets th’ stamp on him for good or bad. Seems like it’s seventh sense which th’ Almighty gives us woman-kind for a safeguard. I trust it.” “I guess I do, too, Mammy,” said Nance, “leastways I felt to trust Brand Fair the first minute I laid eyes on him. He’s different.” Mrs. Allison said no more, but she was thinking back over the long years to that camp-meeting time when she had meant to “frail” the stranger, young John Allison, and how his smiling eyes had coaxed her angry heart to peace—a peace which stayed with her always, through hardship and poverty, through many Western moves, and which softened now the sorrow of his absence. John Allison had seemed to her “different” also.