fifteen, seated on the grass.

She had been reading, but her book had slipped to her feet. With hands
clasped about her knee, and head tilted back, she was watching the lazy
white clouds that stretched like wisps of scattered cotton across the
blue field of the sky. At first the young man was startled by the
impression that she had discovered his presence and was scrutinizing
his position, but a second glance reassured him, and he stretched
himself where a block of granite and, below it, a cedar tree,
effectually protected him from discovery. Thus hidden, he stared at
the girl unblinkingly.

He was like a thirsty traveler drinking at a cool well unexpectedly
discovered in a desert country. For two years he had led the life of
the cowboy, exiled from his kind, going with the boys from lower Texas
to Kansas along the Chisholm Trail, overseeing great herds of cattle,
caring for them day and night, scarcely ever under a roof, even that of
a dugout. Through rain and storm, the ground had been his bed, and
many a blistering summer day a pony captured wild from the plains, and
broken to stand like a dog, had been his only shade. During these two
years of hard life, reckless companions and exacting duties, he had
easily slipped into the grooves of speech and thought common to his
fellows. Only his face, his unconscious movements and accents,
distinguished him from the other boys of "Old Man Walker"--the boss of
the "G-Bar Outfit." On no other condition but that of apparent
assimilation could he have retained his place with Walker's ranchmen;
and in his efforts to remove as quickly as possible the reproach of
tender-foot it was not his fault that he had retained the features of a
different world, or that a certain air, not of the desert, was always
breaking through the crust under which he would have kept his real self
out of sight. He himself was the least conscious that this was so.

For two years he had seen no one like the girl of the cove,
none--though he had seen women and girls of the settlements, often
enough--who even suggested her kind. Her dress, indeed, was plain
enough, and obviously chosen in cheerful ignorance of forms and
conventions, though the color, a delicate pink, was all he could have
wished. After all, the clothes revealed nothing except absence from
city shops and city standards.

That was wonderful hair, its brown tresses gleaming though untouched by
the sun, as if in it were enmeshed innu