She changed still more in the next two months, however. There was the strain of her mother's precarious health which kept Billy Louise always on the alert and always trying to hide her fears. She must be quick to detect the first symptoms of a return attack of the illness, and she must not let her mother suspect that there was danger of a return. That much the doctor had made plain to her.
Besides that, there was an undercurrent of gossip and rumors of cattle stealing, whenever a man stopped at the ranch. It worried Billy Louise, in spite of her rebuilt belief in Ward. Doubt would seize her sometimes in spite of herself, and she did not see Ward often enough to let his personality fight those doubts. She saw him just once in the next two months, and then only for an hour or so.
A man rode up one night and stayed with them until morning, after the open-handed custom of the range-land. Billy Louise did not talk with him very much. He had shifty eyes and a coarse, loose-lipped mouth and a thick neck, and, girl-like, she took a violent dislike to him. But John Pringle told her afterwards that he was Buck Olney, the new stock inspector, and that he was prowling around to see if he could find out anything.
Billy Louise worried a good deal, after that. Once she rode out early with the intention of going to Ward's claim to warn him. But three miles of saner thought changed her purpose: she dared not leave her mother all day, for one thing; and for another, she could scarcely warn Ward without letting him see that she felt he needed warning; and even Billy Louise shrank from what might follow.
The stock inspector stopped again, on his way back to the railroad. Billy Louise was so anxious that she smothered her dislike and treated him nicely, which thawed the man to an alarming amiability. She questioned him artfully--trust Billy Louise for that!--and she decided that the stock inspector was either a very poor detective or a very good actor. He did not, for instance, mention any corral hidden in a blind canyon away back in the hills, and Billy Louise did not mention it, either. He had not found any worked brands, he said. And he did not appear to know anything further about Ward than the mere fact of his existence.
"There's a fellow holding down a claim, away over on Mill Creek," he had remarked. "I'll look him up when I come back, though Seabeck says he's all right."