A shadow of a frown crossed the face of the stranger and was gone again more quickly than a cloud shadow brushed over the window on a windy city in March.
"Well," he said, "this place looks pretty good to me. Ever fish those streams?"
"I'll wager you're missing some first-class trout, though. By Jove, I'd like to cast a couple of times over some of the pools I've passed in the last hour! By the way, who owns that house over there?"
The other lifted his shaggy eyebrows and stared at the stranger.
"William Drew?" repeated the rider, as though imprinting the word on his memory. "Is he home?"
"I'll ride over and ask him if he can put me up."
"Wait a minute. He may be home, but he lives on the other side of the range."
"Ah!" murmured the other, and smiled as though the picture pleased him. "I'll hunt him up and ask him if I can camp out in this house of his for a while."
"Well, it doesn't worry me. I'll drop over the hill and see Drew."
"Maybe you'd better wait. You'll be passin' him on the road, like as not."
"He comes over here on Tuesdays once a month; to-morrow he's about due."
"Good. In the meantime I can camp over there by that stream, eh?"
"By the way, what brings Drew over here every month?"
"Never asked him. I was brung up not to ask questions."
The stranger accepted this subtle rebuke with such an open, infectious laugh that the shepherd smiled in the very act of spitting at the stone, with the result that he missed it by whole inches.
"I'll answer some of the questions you haven't asked, then. My name is Anthony Bard and I'm out here seeing the mountains and having a bully time in general with my rod and gun."
The sad eyes regarded him without interest, but Bard swung from his horse and advanced with outstretched hand.
"I may be about here for a few days and we might as well get acquainted, eh? I'll promise to lay off the questions."
"Same t'you. Don't happen to have no fine-cut about you?"
"So'm I. Ran out an' now all I've got is plug. Kind of hard on the teeth an' full of molasses."
"I've some pipe tobacco, though, which might do."
He produced a pouch which Logan opened, taking from it a generous pinch.
"Looks kind of like fine-cut--smells kind of like the real thing"--here he removed the quid from his mouth and introduced the great pinch of tobacco--"an' I'll be damned if it don't taste a pile the same!"