It had occurred to her that she might add another perfectly withering verse to that poem.

It could start: "While sailing in my airplane boat, I'll ask Venus to mend my coat." Mary V started back, searing couplets forming with incredible swiftness in her brain.

How she would flay Johnny Jewel with the keen blade of her wit! If he thought he was the only person at the Rolling R ranch who could write poetry, it would be a real kindness to show him his mistake.
Just then Bud Norris and Bill Hayden came up from the corrals, heading straight for the bunk house.

Mary V walked on, past the bunk house and across the narrow flat opposite the corrals and up on the first bench of the bluff that sheltered the ranch buildings from the worst of the desert winds.

She did it very innocently, and as though she had never in her life had any thought of invading the squat, adobe building kept sacred to the leisure hours of the Rolling R boys.
There was a certain ledge where she had played when she was a child, and which she favored nowadays as a place to sit and look down upon the activities in the big corral--whenever activities were taking place therein--an interested spectator who was not suspected of being within hearing.