I didn’t go back to Reno, not that day. Judy and Polly came up . . . Judy who hadn’t been anywhere near Tahoe, and who, in one of those Hardyesque coincidences, had actually been going up to her apartment in the elevator just as I slipped down the stairs by it, to avoid Colonel Primrose if he’d come out of Mrs. de Courcey’s room while I was waiting.
I went down with them, around the lake and by way of Carson City. We turned in the road beyond the Bowers’, where a sign in the shape of the golden sun with a ring-necked squirrel sitting on it pointed to Polly’s ranch, nestling in the pine trees at the foot of the smooth dun-colored hills. A couple of Basque shepherd dogs asleep on the wide verandah got up and barked once, and came to greet us, wagging their lovely tails. A cowboy on a pinto
