particularly frightened."

"Oh, well, nothin' alarms him--not even refinement," said Mr. McLean,
with his grin. "And she'll fool your Virginian like she done the balance
of us. You wait. Shucks! If all the girls were that chilly, why, what
would us poor punchers do?"

"You have me cornered," said I, and we sat in a philosophical silence,
Lin on the floor still, and I at the window. There I looked out upon
a scene my eyes never tired of then, nor can my memory now. Spring
had passed over it with its first, lightest steps. The pastured levels
undulated in emerald. Through the many-changing sage, that just this
moment of to-day was lilac, shone greens scarce a week old in the
dimples of the foot-hills; and greens new-born beneath today's sun
melted among them. Around the doubling of the creek in the willow
thickets glimmered skeined veils of yellow and delicate crimson. The
stream poured turbulently away from the snows of the mountains behind
us. It went winding in many folds across the meadows into distance
and smallness, and so vanished round the great red battlement of wall
beyond. Upon this were falling the deep hues of afternoon--violet, rose,
and saffron, swimming and meeting as if some prism had dissolved and
flowed over the turrets and crevices of the sandstone. Far over there I
saw a dot move.

"At last!" said I.

Lin looked out of the window. "It's more than Tommy," said he, at
once; and his eyes made it out before mine could. "It's a wagon. That's
Tommy's bald-faced horse alongside. He's fooling to the finish," Lin
severely commented, as if, after all this delay, there should at least
be a homestretch.

Presently, however, a homestretch seemed likely to occur. The bald-faced
horse executed some lively manoeuvres, and Tommy's voice reached us
faintly through the light spring air. He was evidently howling the
remarkable strain of yells that the cow-punchers invented as the speech
best understood by cows--"Oi-ee, yah, whoop-yahye-ee, oooo-oop, oop,
oop-oop-oop-oop-yah-hee!" But that gives you no idea of it. Alphabets
are worse than photographs. It is not the lungs of every man that can
produce these effects, nor even from armies, eagles, or mules were such
sounds ever heard on earth. The cow-puncher invented them. And when
the last cow-puncher is laid to rest (if that, alas! have not already
befallen) the yells will be forever gone. Singularly enough, the cattle
appeared to appreciate them. Tommy always did t