"Always wantin' to ride around with yuh an' see what's goin' on," declared Butch Siegrist sourly. "If they're wimmin, yuh can't even give a cuss without lookin' first to see if they're near enough to hear."
Stratton made a mental resolution that if anything of that sort came up, he would do his best to duck the job of playing cicerone to Miss Stella Manning, attractive as she was. So far his bluff seemed to have worked, but with a mind so entirely blank of the slightest detail of their acquaintance, he knew that at any moment the most casual remark might serve to rouse her suspicion.
Fortunately, his desire to remain in the background was abetted by Tex Lynch. Whether or not the foreman wanted to keep him away from the ranch-owner's friends as well as from Miss Thorne herself, Buck could not quite determine. But while the fence-repairing progressed, Stratton was never by any chance detailed to other duties which might keep him in the neighborhood of the ranch-house, and on the one occasion when Miss Thorne and her guests rode out to where the men were working, Lynch saw to it that there was no opportunity for anything like private conversation between them and the object of his solicitude.
Buck watched his manoeuvering with secret amusement.
"Wouldn't he be wild if he knew he was playing right into my hands?" he thought.
His face darkened as he glanced thoughtfully at the departing figure of Miss Manning. She had greeted him warmly and betrayed a very evident inclination to linger in his vicinity. There had been a slight touch of pique in her treatment of Lynch, who hung around so persistently.
"I wish to thunder I had an idea of how much she knows," he muttered. "Did I act like a brainless idiot when I was--was that way, or not?"
He had asked the same question of the hospital surgeon and got an unsatisfactory answer. It all depended, the doctor told him non-committally. He might easily have shown evidences of lost memory; on the other hand, it was quite possible, especially with chance acquaintances, that his manner had been entirely normal.
There was nothing to be gained, however, by racking his brain for something that wasn't there, and Buck soon gave up the attempt. He could only trust to luck and his own inventiveness, and hope that Lynch's delightfully unconscious easing of the situation would continue.