IT was nearly noon the following day when a lone horsewoman rode into the grove of cottonwoods that stood before the ranch house of Gustav Tanburt. No one came out to meet her. A few chickens moseyed about, commanded by a black rooster with a red muffler about his neck and a redder comb, deeply notched. He gave Mary Temple a wall-eyed stare. A young calf, tied to a tree on thirty feet of rope, took the occasion to celebrate Mary’s advent by racing round in a circle, carrying its tail as if it were broken in the middle, and ending the performance by encircling several trees with the rope and coming to an enforced, bawling standstill. Mary dismounted in a spasm of suffering, watered her horse at a dripping trough adjacent to a flow of artesian water from a rusty pipe, lowered the reins over the horse’s head, and walked to the painfully small and circumspect veranda. She knocked smartly on a weather-stained door, in which a brown-china knob hung like a loose tooth. Gus Tanburt, for all the riches that had been forced upon him, clave to the familiar relics of his days of haphazard struggling. Mary knocked twice. A large black-green blow fly buzzed about before her peaked nose, seeming to anticipate the opening of the door. Mary struck at it viciously, not with the flat of her hand but with her bony fist. Mary was in no humour to administer punishment with the flat of her hand. She was in the mood to deliver a haymaker and put her scant weight behind it. Shuffling footsteps preceded the opening of the door, and Gus Tanburt bleared at her from between wind-stung eyelids. The eyelids had no lashes, and the skin of the rancher’s face was slick and shiny as an ancient scar. His teeth were few and far between--yellow fangs in his yielding gums. The breath of his brown clay pipe nearly asphyxiated his gentle caller. He glowered at Mary as if she were the tax assessor. “Where’d you come from?” was his inhospitable greeting. “I’m riding to Britton,” answered Mary. (Shirttail Henry had coached her.) “I wanted to know if I couldn’t buy something to eat and a feed for my horse.” “Who are ye?” “My name is Winifred Allison.” (Mary always wished she had been born Winifred Allison. Most of us have pet names that we wish our parents had had the sense to bestow on us. Winifred Allison was Mary’s.) “Where ye from?” “Fresno.” “I mean jest now.” “Oh! I’ve been riding through the mountains from Glenning.” “Glennin’! That’s a hundred an’ fifty miles t’other side o’ th’ range, woman!” “I’m not disputing that, man!” Mary snapped back. “I’m telling you that I rode from Glenning here, on my way to Britton. What’s the odds? Can you sell me some dinner and a feed of hay for the horse?” Gus Tanburt looked over her ridgy shoulder and squinted at her horse. For a few moments Mary scarcely breathed. But the watery eyes coasted back to her again, and she knew that the rancher had not recognized the animal as belonging to Diamond H.