"Very interesting, señorita," agreed the stranger reflectively. "But if I have a good job, I can't see how it will give me aid or comfort to know that you've acquired knowledge, and stopped guessing. When's your time up behind the bars?"
"Whenever my clothes get dry enough to fool the dear home folks."
"You must be a joy to the bosom of your family," he observed, "also a blessing."
He heard again the girlish laughter and concluded she could not be over sixteen. There was silence for a space while only the creak of the grindstone cut the stillness. Whoever she was, she had given him a brief illuminating vision of the tactics of Conrad, the manager for the ranches of Granados and La Partida, the latter being the Sonora end of the old Spanish land grant. Even a girl had noted that the rough work had been turned over to a new American from the first circle of the _rodeo_. He stood there staring out across the sage green to the far purple hills of the Green Springs range.
"You've fixed that cinch, what you waiting for?" asked the voice at last, and the young fellow straightened up and lifted the saddle.
"That's so," he acknowledged. "But as you whistled to me and the call seemed friendly, it was up to me to halt for orders--from the lady in distress."
Again he heard the soft laughter and the voice.
"Glad you liked the friendly call, Johnny Reb," she confessed. "That's my call. If ever you hear it where there are no larks, you'll know who it is."
"Sure," he agreed, yanking at the cinch, "and I'll come a lopin' with the bonnie blue flag, to give aid and succor to the enemy."
"You will not!" she retorted. "You'll just whistle back friendly, and be chums. I think my clothes are dry now, and you'd better travel. If you meet anyone looking for a stray maverick, you haven't seen me."
After he had mounted and passed along the corral to the road, he turned in the saddle and looked back. He could see no one in the window of the bars, but there came to him clear and sweet the field bugle of the meadow lark.
He answered it, lifted his sombrero and rode soberly towards the Granados corrals, three miles across the valley. Queer little trick she must be. American girls did not usually ride abroad alone along the border, and certainly did not chum with the Mexicans to the extent of borrowing shirts. Then as he lifted the bridle and Pardner broke into a lope, he noted an elderly horseman jogging along across trail on a little mule. Each eyed the other appraisingly.
