Ward answered the note then and there, and called her Wilhemina-mine--which was an awkward name to write and cost him five minutes of cogitation over the spelling. But he wanted it down on paper where she could see it and remember how it sounded when he said it, even if it did look queer. Farther along he started to call her Bill Loo, but rubbed it out and substituted Lady Girl (with capitals). Altogether he did better than he knew, for he made Billy Louise cry when she read it, and he made her say "Dear Ward!" under her breath, and remember how his hair waved over his left temple, and how he looked when that smile hid just behind his lips and his eyes. And he made her forget that she had lost faith in him. She needed to cry, and she needed to remember and also to forget some things; for life was a hard, dull drab in Boise, with nothing to lighten it, save a vicarious hope that did not comfort. Billy Louise was not stupid. She saw through the vagueness of the doctors; and besides, she was so hungry for her hills that she felt like beating the doctors with her fists, because they did nothing to make her mommie well enough to go home. She grew to hate the nurse and her neutral cheerfulness. That is how the fall passed for Billy Louise, and the early part of the winter. CHAPTER XV "YOU WON'T GET ME AGAIN" One day late in the fall, Ward was riding the hills off to the north and west of his claim, looking at the condition of the range there and keeping an eye out for Y6 cattle. He had bought another dozen head of mixed stock, over toward Hardup, and they were not yet past the point of straying off their new range. So, having keen eyes and the incentive to use them, he paid attention to stock tracks in the soft places, and he saw everything within the sweep of his vision; and, since the day was clear and fine, his range of vision, when he reached a high point, extended to the Three Buttes away out in the desert. By sheer accident he rode up to the canyon where the little corral lay hidden at the end, and looked down. And since he rode up at an angle different from the one Billy Louise had taken, the corral was directly beneath him--so directly, in fact, that half of it was hidden from sight. He saw that there were cattle within it, however, and two men at work there. And by chance he lifted his eyes and saw the nose of a horse beyond a jutting ledge sixty yards or so away, and the crown of a hat showing just above the ledge; a lookout, he judged instantly, and pulled Rattler behind the rock he had been at some pains to ride around.