"No we won't, I've got a job and made a promise, got to help clean up the work here for the winter. Promised to take the next load of horses East."
"That's a new one," observed his new friend. "Conrad himself has always gone East with the horses, or sent Brehmen, his secretary. But never mind, Bub, the eastern trip won't take long. I'll be devilin' around getting our outfit and when the chance comes--us for the Three Hills of Gold!"
"It listens well," agreed K. Rhodes, "cheeriest little _pasear_ I've struck in the county. We'll have some great old powwows, even if we don't make a cent, and some day you'll tell me about the mental kinks in the makeup of our Prussian friend, Conrad. He sounds interesting to me."
Captain Pike uttered a profane and lurid word or two concerning Mr. Conrad, and stated he'd be glad when Billie was of age. Singleton, and therefore Conrad, would only have the management up to that time. Billie would know horses if nothing else, and--Then he interrupted himself and stared back the way he had come.
"I'm a forgetful old fool!" he stated with conviction. "I meandered out to take a look around for her, and I didn't like the looks of that little dab of a saddle Conrad had put on Pat. You didn't see anything of her, did you?"
"A slip of a girl who rides like an Indian, rides a black horse."
"No, I've seen no one," said the young chap truthfully enough. "But who did you say your girl was?"
"You'll find out if you hold your job long enough for her to be of age," said Pike darkly. "She'll be your boss instead of Conrad. It's Billie Bernard, the owner of Granados and La Partida."
But K. Rhodes said he didn't. Billie seemed to fit the sort of girl who would garb herself in Pedro's shirt and whistle at him through the bars of the little window.
It took less than a week for Kit Rhodes to conclude that the girl behind the bars had a true inspiration regarding his own position on her ranches. There was no open hostility to him, yet it was evident that difficulties were cleverly put in his way.
Not by Philip Singleton, the colorless, kindly disposed gentleman of Pike's description. But by various intangible methods, he was made to feel an outsider by the manager, Conrad, and his more confidential Mexican assistants. They were punctiliously polite, too polite for a horse-ranch outfit. Yet again and again a group of them fell silent when he joined them, and as his work was with the horse herds of La Partida, that part of the great grant which spread over the border into Sonora, he was often camped fifty miles south of the hacienda of Granados, and saw no more of either the old prospector, or the tantalizing girl of the voice and the whistle.