ete, Conniston could never for a second
look upon this illiterate, uncouth cowboy as an equal, could not
refrain from feeling toward him an amused and tolerant contempt. If
palmy days ever came again, he was used to thinking, he would find a
place for the red-headed man in his retinue of hired men. He could
have an easy job at a good salary gardening about the Adirondack
country home, or perhaps he might grow into a fair chauffeur.

Gradually Conniston had learned how to ride the wild devils they
called broken saddle-horses as a cowman should, and without pulling
leather. With Lonesome Pete a patient tutor, he was even beginning to
learn how to throw a rope without entangling his own person and his
own horse in it, and how to make it obey him and drop over the horns
of a running steer. These things came slowly and with many
discouraging failures. But they served as a stimulant and an
encouragement to the man who taught him and whom he taught.

When he had been with the outfit for three weeks Conniston began to
feel confident that he could perform the part of the day's work which
was allotted to him. His muscles had begun to harden so that they no
longer ached and throbbed day and night.

Then one morning he saw Argyl Crawford. He had begun of late to tell
himself that he had invested her in his imagination with a charm which
was not hers; that after the studied neglect that he had sustained at
her hands and at her father's hands he was going to forget all about
her. And now, as she came unexpectedly out of the circle of trees,
pausing upon a little grassy knoll just where his idle eyes were
resting, where the early sun found her out, making her a thing of
light against the dull-green background, Conniston caught his breath
and told himself that she was in reality the queen of this land of
enchantment.

She came out of the forest as a mountain Naiad might have done, her
beauty a glorious, wonderful thing, her grace the free, lithe,
unconscious grace of the wild things of this country of hers,
swift-footed, firm-footed, and, it seemed to the man who watched her,
with a sort of shyness which belongs to the creature of the woodlands.
As she paused, her hands at her sides, her head lifted with tip-tilted
chin, unconscious that any one saw her, not seeing the man who
squatted by the spring below the bunk-house, he felt vaguely as though
he were looking upon a nymph who, if he so much as moved, would turn
swiftly and flas