Phil's got a few head that he works with mine--a pretty good bunch by now--for he's kept addin' to what his father left, an' I've paid him wages ever since he was big enough.

Phil don't say much, even to Stella an' me, but I know he's figurin' on fixin' up the old home place some day." After a long silence the Dean said again, as if voicing some conclusion of his unspoken thoughts: "Jim Reid is pretty well fixed, you see, an' Kitty bein' the only girl, it's natural, I reckon, that they should have ideas about her future, an' all that.

I reckon it's natural, too, that the girl should find ranch life away out here so far from anywhere, a little slow after her three years at school in the East.

She never says it, but somehow you can most always tell what Kitty's thinkin' without her speakin' a word." "I have known people like that," said Patches, probably because there was so little that he could say.
"Yes, an' when you know Kitty, you'll say, like I always have, that if there's a man in Yavapai County that wouldn't ride the hoofs off the best horse in his outfit, night or day, to win a smile from her, he ought to be lynched." That afternoon in Prescott they purchased an outfit for Patches, and the following day set out for the long return drive to the ranch.
They had reached the top of the hill at the western end of the meadow lane, when they saw a young woman, on a black horse, riding away from the gate that opens from the lane into the Pot-Hook-S meadow pasture, toward the ranch buildings on the farther side of the field.
As they drove into the yard at home, it was nearly supper time, and the men were coming from the corrals.
"Kitty's been over all the afternoon," Little Billy informed them promptly.

"I told her all about you, Patches.