The pretty young blonde looked at him in surprise and bewilderment, taken aback by the apparent irrelevance of his interruption.
"Cat," he censured in mock reproof.
"Oh!" she cried. "I never meant it that way. You will find we are very frank here. Everybody knows Paula"s age. She tells it herself. I"m eighteen--so, there. And now, just for your meanness, how old are you?"
"As old as d.i.c.k," he replied promptly.
"And he"s forty," she laughed triumphantly. "Are you coming swimming?
--the water will be dreadfully cold."
Graham shook his head. "I"m going riding with d.i.c.k."
Her face fell with all the ingenuousness of eighteen.
"Oh," she protested, "some of his eternal green manures, or hillside terracing, or water-pocketing."
"But he said something about swimming at five."
Her face brightened joyously.
"Then we"ll meet at the tank. It must be the same party. Paula said swimming at five."
As they parted under a long arcade, where his way led to the tower room for a change into riding clothes, she stopped suddenly and called:
"Oh, Mr. Graham."
He turned obediently.
"You really are not compelled to fall in love with Paula, you know. It was just my way of putting it."
"I shall be very, very careful," he said solemnly, although there was a twinkle in his eye as he concluded.
Nevertheless, as he went on to his room, he could not but admit to himself that the Paula Forrest charm, or the far fairy tentacles of it, had already reached him and were wrapping around him. He knew, right there, that he would prefer the engagement to ride to have been with her than with his old-time friend, d.i.c.k.
As he emerged from the house to the long hitching-rails under the ancient oaks, he looked eagerly for his hostess. Only d.i.c.k was there, and the stable-man, although the many saddled horses that stamped in the shade promised possibilities. But d.i.c.k and he rode away alone. d.i.c.k pointed out her horse, an alert bay thoroughbred, stallion at that, under a small Australian saddle with steel stirrups, and double-reined and single-bitted.
"I don"t know her plans," he said. "She hasn"t shown up yet, but at any rate she"ll be swimming later. We"ll meet her then."
Graham appreciated and enjoyed the ride, although more than once he found himself glancing at his wrist-watch to ascertain how far away five o"clock might yet be. Lambing time was at hand, and through home field after home field he rode with his host, now one and now the other dismounting to turn over onto its feet rotund and glorious Shropshire and Ramboullet-Merino ewes so hopelessly the product of man"s selection as to be unable to get off, of themselves, from their own broad backs, once they were down with their four legs helplessly sky-aspiring.
"I"ve really worked to make the American Merino," d.i.c.k was saying; "to give it the developed leg, the strong back, the well-sprung rib, and the stamina. The old-country breed lacked the stamina. It was too much hand-reared and manicured."
"You"re doing things, big things," Graham a.s.sured him. "Think of shipping rams to Idaho! That speaks for itself."
d.i.c.k Forrest"s eyes were sparkling, as he replied:
"Better than Idaho. Incredible as it may sound, and asking forgiveness for bragging, the great flocks to-day of Michigan and Ohio can trace back to my California-bred Ramboullet rams. Take Australia. Twelve years ago I sold three rams for three hundred each to a visiting squatter. After he took them back and demonstrated them he sold them for as many thousand each and ordered a shipload more from me.
Australia will never be the worse for my having been. Down there they say that lucerne, artesian wells, refrigerator ships, and Forrest"s rams have tripled the wool and mutton production."
Quite by chance, on the way back, meeting Mendenhall, the horse manager, they were deflected by him to a wide pasture, broken by wooded canyons and studded with oaks, to look over a herd of yearling Shires that was to be dispatched next morning to the upland pastures and feeding sheds of the Miramar Hills. There were nearly two hundred of them, rough-coated, beginning to shed, large-boned and large for their age.
"We don"t exactly crowd them," d.i.c.k Forrest explained, "but Mr.
Mendenhall sees to it that they never lack full nutrition from the time they are foaled. Up there in the hills, where they are going, they"ll balance their gra.s.s with grain. This makes them a.s.semble every night at the feeding places and enables the feeders to keep track of them with a minimum of effort. I"ve shipped fifty stallions, two-year-olds, every year for the past five years, to Oregon alone. They"re sort of standardized, you know. The people up there know what they"re getting.
They know my standard so well that they"ll buy unsight and unseen."
"You must cull a lot, then," Graham ventured.
"And you"ll see the culls draying on the streets of San Francisco,"
d.i.c.k answered.
"Yes, and on the streets of Denver," Mr. Mendenhall amplified, "and of Los Angeles, and--why, two years ago, in the horse-famine, we shipped twenty carloads of four-year geldings to Chicago, that averaged seventeen hundred each. The lightest were sixteen, and there were matched pairs up to nineteen hundred. Lord, Lord, that was a year for horse-prices--blue sky, and then some."
As Mr. Mendenhall rode away, a man, on a slender-legged, head-tossing Palomina, rode up to them and was introduced to Graham as Mr. Hennessy, the ranch veterinary.
"I heard Mrs. Forrest was looking over the colts," he explained to his employer, "and I rode across to give her a glance at The Fawn here.
She"ll be riding her in less than a week. What horse is she on to-day?"
"The Fop," d.i.c.k replied, as if expecting the comment that was prompt as the disapproving shake of Mr. Hennessy"s head.
"I can never become converted to women riding stallions," muttered the veterinary. "The Fop is dangerous. Worse--though I take my hat off to his record--he"s malicious and vicious. She--Mrs. Forrest ought to ride him with a muzzle--but he"s a striker as well, and I don"t see how she can put cushions on his hoofs."
"Oh, well," d.i.c.k placated, "she has a bit that _is_ a bit in his mouth, and she"s not afraid to use it--"
"If he doesn"t fall over on her some day," Mr. Hennessy grumbled.
"Anyway, I"ll breathe easier when she takes to The Fawn here. Now _she"s_ a lady"s mount--all the spirit in the world, but nothing vicious. She"s a sweet mare, a sweet mare, and she"ll steady down from her friskiness. But she"ll always be a gay handful--no riding academy proposition."
"Let"s ride over," d.i.c.k suggested. "Mrs. Forrest"ll have a gay handful in The Fop if she"s ridden him into that bunch of younglings.--It"s her territory, you know," he elucidated to Graham. "All the house horses and lighter stock is her affair. And she gets grand results. I can"t understand it, myself. It"s like a little girl straying into an experimental laboratory of high explosives and mixing the stuff around any old way and getting more powerful combinations than the graybeard chemists."
The three men took a cross-ranch road for half a mile, turned up a wooded canyon where ran a spring-trickle of stream, and emerged on a wide rolling terrace rich in pasture. Graham"s first glimpse was of a background of many curious yearling and two-year-old colts, against which, in the middleground, he saw his hostess, on the back of the bright bay thoroughbred, The Fop, who, on hind legs, was striking his forefeet in the air and squealing shrilly. They reined in their mounts and watched.
"He"ll get her yet," the veterinary muttered morosely. "That Fop isn"t safe."
But at that moment Paula Forrest, unaware of her audience, with a sharp cry of command and a cavalier thrust of sharp spurs into The Fop"s silken sides, checked him down to four-footedness on the ground and a restless, champing quietness.
"Taking chances?" d.i.c.k mildly reproached her, as the three rode up.
"Oh, I can manage him," she breathed between tight teeth, as, with ears back and vicious-gleaming eyes, The Fop bared his teeth in a bite that would have been perilously near to Graham"s leg had she not reined the brute abruptly away across the neck and driven both spurs solidly into his sides.
The Fop quivered, squealed, and for the moment stood still.
"It"s the old game, the white man"s game," d.i.c.k laughed. "She"s not afraid of him, and he knows it. She outgames him, out-savages him, teaches him what savagery is in its intimate mood and tense."
Three times, while they looked on, ready to whirl their own steeds away if he got out of hand, The Fop attempted to burst into rampage, and three times, solidly, with careful, delicate hand on the bitter bit, Paula Forrest dealt him double spurs in the ribs, till he stood, sweating, frothing, fretting, beaten, and in hand.
"It"s the way the white man has always done," d.i.c.k moralized, while Graham suffered a fluttery, shivery sensation of admiration of the beast-conquering Little Lady. "He"s out-savaged the savage the world around," d.i.c.k went on. "He"s out-endured him, out-filthed him, out-scalped him, out-tortured him, out-eaten him--yes, out-eaten him.
It"s a fair wager that the white man, in extremis, has eaten more of the genus h.o.m.o, than the savage, in extremis, has eaten."
"Good afternoon," Paula greeted her guest, the ranch veterinary, and her husband. "I think I"ve got him now. Let"s look over the colts. Just keep an eye, Mr. Graham, on his mouth. He"s a dreadful snapper. Ride free from him, and you"ll save your leg for old age."