He lighted his cigarette, blew out the match and flipped it from him. He took three long, luxurious inhalations and studied James Blaine Hawkins more carefully from under the deep-fringed eyelashes that had helped to earn him a living. Patricia, he perceived, had been attacked by another “wonderful” idea. Though it seemed rather incredible that even the impulsive Patricia should have failed to read aright a man so true to type as was James Blaine Hawkins. “Well, I’ve saved you a few tons of alfalfa hay,” Gary observed carelessly. “Fellow I was with left me here while he went on to another camp. I found Waddell gone, and my friend hasn’t come after me yet. So I’m stuck here for the present, you see. And Waddy’s hay needed cutting, so I cut it for him. Had to kill time somehow till he gets back.” Gary blew a leisurely mouthful of smoke. “Isn’t Waddell coming back?” he asked with exactly the right degree of concern in voice and manner. James Blaine Hawkins studied that question for a minute. But he could see nothing to doubt or criticize in the elucidation, so he decided to accept it at face value. He failed to see that Gary’s explanation had been merely suggested. “Waddell, as you call him, has sold out to a girl in Los Angeles,” James Blaine Hawkins explained in a more friendly tone. “I got an agreement here to run the place on shares. I don’t know nothing about Waddell. He’s out of it.” Gary’s eyebrows lifted slightly in what the camera would record as his terribly worried expression. “He isn’t--in the--er--asylum, is he? Was I too late to save poor Waddy?” James Blaine Hawkins looked blank. “Save him from what? What yuh talkin’ about, anyway?” Gary opened his lips to answer, then closed them and shook his head. When he really did speak it was quite plain to James Blaine Hawkins that he had reconsidered, and was not saying as much as he had at first intended to say. “If you’re here to stay, I hope you’ll be all right and don’t have the same thing happen to you that happened to Waddy,” he said cautiously. “I think, myself, that Waddell had too keen an imagination. He was a nervous cuss, anyway; I really don’t think you’ll be bothered.” “Bothered with what?” James Blaine Hawkins demanded impatiently. “I can’t see what you’re driving at.” Gary gave him a little, secretive smile and the slight head-shake that always went with it on the screen. “Well, I sure hope you never do--see.” And with that he deliberately changed the subject and refused artfully to be led back toward it.