Jami had washed and washed on the bunkhouse veranda until even his fingernails were clean. He was now struggling into new boots, which fitted so tightly over the instep that the operation was excruciating. But the boots were the finishing touch to a superb costume--cowhide chaps, buff corduroy shirt, beaver hat limbered up to a picturesque limpness, and a blue and orange silk neckerchief, the loose elegance of the whole artfully filling out six feet two of incredibly thin cowboy. “’Pears to me,” observed Ole Hossfoot Cantnor, who, having oiled his hair, now sat on the edge of a bunk oiling a gun, “you’re takin’ a awful lot o’ trouble fer just seein’ Raquel again.” He squinted down the barrel of the gun, a pretty little twenty-two that he himself had given Raquel two years ago. “Brr-rr,” snarled Jami, “I see you shaved your chin first time in twenty years, stid of mowin’ it off with a pair o’ sheep shears.” And, having at last worked into the boots, for which he had spent the whole of his past two months’ salary, namely forty dollars, Jami examined his own chin for any fugitive blonde down that might not have been revealed the first time. He scorned notice of Hossfoot’s new red flannel shirt and his best corduroy breeches. Up at the ranch house there was an air “_de fiesta_,” as Mariquita Esquibal confided to her little sister. Mrs. Daniels, a green apron over her fresh gingham, knelt before the open oven turning a pan of light bread. On the long kitchen table twelve big golden-brown loaves cooled, giving off a delicious odor. They never baked less than twenty-four loaves at a time at Los Ranchos, and they baked every other day. The verandas had been swept and scoured with lava sand and buckets of hot water, the kitchen floor freshly oiled. A clean red cloth covered the kitchen table. There were three smaller rooms opening from the kitchen, pantries and storerooms, and in the middle one of these there lay on a massive table a full haunch of venison, which Ole Hossfoot had brought down with him from the mountains the day before. Beside it were spread some three dozen plump little birds, all skinned, ready for the frying pan--late quail that Russell had shot at daybreak that morning. Mrs. Daniels rose and passed through the three rooms to an outer one, where, over a spring bubbling from the virgin rock floor, the milk shelves were hung. Lifting down one of the blue pans, she unrolled from the top of the milk a little blanket of cream half an inch thick, popped it into a glass churn standing near, and returned to the kitchen with the clabber. “Think I’ll make a mess of gingerbread,” she explained to the resplendent Jami, who lounged into the kitchen just then. “Raquel always did like it. Expect I have time before they git here.” She smiled a crinkly-eyed, patient little smile. “Them prune pies aren’t goin’ to last very long.”