“God bless that pinto cat!” he murmured, and leaned to smooth the sorrel’s mane which the wind was tossing and tangling. “We won’t see him again--for a while, anyway. But golly grandma, won’t Pat be sore at the way I jimmed her revenge on Handsome Gary! But you know, Jazz, I expect to have to live with Pat, and I don’t expect to do all my walking on my knees, either. A little demonstration of manly authority now and then does ’em good. They won’t own it, Jazz, but they all like to feel they’ve tamed a cave man, and goodness knows when he may get rough. I worked in ‘The Taming of the Shrew,’ and I learned a lot about women from that.” The dust cloud rolled out of sight around a lonesome black butte, and Gary waved it a mocking farewell and got out the map which Monty had made of the trail to Kawich. “Five miles down the trail toward town, and then turn short off to the left,” he mumbled, studying the crude map. “That’s simple enough--and no wonder I couldn’t trail Monty afoot. I didn’t walk to where he turned off. But hold on here! Dotted line shows faint stock trail straight across country to the Kawich road. Monty did say something about a cut-off, Jazz. All right, we’ll hunt around here in the sage till we find that dotted line. This is great stuff. Feel so good now I don’t have to go see Monty to get cheered up. But we’ll go just the same--and see the country.” The trail, when he found it, was so faint that it was scarcely distinguishable in the gravelly soil. In places where they followed a rocky ridge Gary would have missed it altogether; but once on the trail Jazz followed it by instinct and his familiarity with the country. Probably he had traveled that way before, carrying Waddell, or perhaps Steve Carson, since Jazz was well past his youth. Unconsciously Gary laid aside his movie habit of weaving in and out among the sage at a gallop, and dropped back into the old, shacking trail-trot he had learned from his father’s riders. It was the gait to which Jazz was long accustomed, and it carried them steadily over the rough mesa to where the road angled off through the foothills. The distant hills looked more unreal than ever. The clouds that grouped themselves around the violet-tinted peaks were like dabs of white paint upon a painted sky line. Again the sense of waiting in a tremendous calm impressed Gary with the immeasurable patience of the universe.