g able
to--that was the hardest thing any of us ever tried. The way he worked
to make the ma of Bonnie Bell happy was plain for anybody to see. He'd
stand and look at the place where he seen her go by last, and forget he
had a rope in his hand and his horse a-waiting.

We had to set at the table, all three of us, after she died--him and the
kid and me--and nobody at the end of the table where she used to
set--her always in clothes that wasn't just like ours. I couldn't hardly
stand it. But that was how game Old Man Wright was.

He wasn't really old. Like when he was younger, he was tall and
straight, and had sandy hair and blue eyes, and weighed round a hundred
and eighty, lean. Everybody on the range always had knew Old Man Wright.
He was captain of the round-up when he was twenty and president of the
cattle association as soon as it was begun. I don't know as a better
cowman ever was in Wyoming. He grew up at it.

So did Bonnie Bell grow up at it, for that matter. She pleased her pa a
plenty, for she took to a saddle like a duck, so to speak. Time she was
fifteen she could ride any of the stock we had, and if a bronc' pitched
when she rid him she thought that was all right; she thought it was just
a way horses had and something to be put up with that didn't amount to
much. She didn't know no better. She never did think that anything or
anybody in the world had it in for her noways whatever. She natural
believed that everything and everybody liked her, for that was the way
she felt and that was the way it shaped there on the range. There wasn't
a hand on the place that would of allowed anything to cross Bonnie Bell
in any way, shape or manner.

She grew up tallish, like her pa, and slim and round, same as her ma.
She had brownish or yellowish hair, too, which was sunburned, for she
never wore no bonnet; but her eyes was like her ma's, which was dark and
not blue, though her skin was white like her pa's under his shirt
sleeves, only she never had no freckles the way her pa had--some was
large as nickels on him in places. She maybe had one freckle on her
nose, but little.

Bonnie Bell was a rider from the time she was a baby, like I said, and
she went into all the range work like she was built for it. Wild she
was, like a filly or yearling that kicks up its heels when the sun
shines and the wind blows. And pretty! Say, a new wagon with red wheels
and yellow trimmings ain't fit for to compare with her, not none at al