"Oh, yes, ye do! Ye savvy, all right. Ye're foxy, Mr. Drew. I'll say no more just now. But when ye need my help...." Their voices trailed off. Once again the girl's supple body rose from the hips, and she searched the ferns on every side. For several minutes she lay quite still in the same position. Then, perhaps fifty feet on her left, a head rose above the tall fronds, and then a body followed it. Next instant a dark figure was hurrying back toward the spring. Jessamy waited until sight and sound of it were no more, then rose and ran with all her might toward the house. She slipped in at her private door, hustled out of her clothes, and began donning her gorgeous red dress again. "So Old Man Selden always shoots straight from the shoulder, eh?" she muttered. "Piffle! When he wants to be he's a regular Barkis-is-willin'!" In the midst of her dressing her mother tapped. "Jessamy, where have you been?" she asked. "Mr. Selden and Mr. Drew are in the living room now. I've knocked twice, but you didn't answer." "I was outdoors," Jessamy replied. "I'm dressing now. I'll be right out." And a minute or two later Oliver Drew gasped and his blue eyes grew wide as a silk-garbed figure, with a red rose in her raven hair, glided toward him. Yea, even as the girl in red had planned that he should gasp! CHAPTER XVIII SPIES Smith, the shaggy, mouse-coloured burro, lifted his voice in that sobbing wail of welcome which has caused his kind to be designated as desert canaries, as Oliver rode into the pasture. Smith's was a gregarious soul. To be left entirely alone was torture. His ears were twelve inches long, and the protuberances over his eyes were so craggy that Oliver had hesitated between the names of Smith and William Cullen Bryant. On the whole, though, "Smith" had seemed more companionable. Oliver loosed Poche to console the lonesome heart of Smith and went at the irrigating of his garden. When a stream of water was trickling along every hoed furrow he put on heavy hobnailed laced-boots and went into the hills in search of his third bee tree. It seems illogical to set down that one could live for nearly two months on forty acres of land without having explored every square foot of it. But Oliver had not trod upon at least two thirds of his property. Locked chaparral presents many difficulties. Farmers detest it, and artists go wild over it. But farmers are obliged to sprawl flat and crawl through it occasionally, while artists sit on their stools at a distance from it that brings out all the alluring browns and yellows and greens and olives of which it is capable under the magic of the changing sunlight.