her men rests
finally on an individual liberty, a freedom from restraint either of
society or convention, a lawlessness, an accepting of his own standard
alone. He is absolutely self-poised and sufficient; and that
self-poise and that sufficiency he takes pains to assure first of all.
After their assurance he is willing to enter into human relations. His
attitude toward everything in life is, not suspicious, but watchful.
He is "gathered together," his elbows at his side.

This evidences itself most strikingly in his terseness of speech. A
man dependent on himself naturally does not give himself away to the
first comer. He is more interested in finding out what the other fellow
is than in exploiting his own importance. A man who does much
promiscuous talking he is likely to despise, arguing that man
incautious, hence weak.

Yet when he does talk, he talks to the point and with a vivid and
direct picturesqueness of phrase which is as refreshing as it is
unexpected. The delightful remodeling of the English language in Mr.
Alfred Lewis's "Wolfville" is exaggerated only in quantity, not in
quality. No cowboy talks habitually in quite as original a manner as
Mr. Lewis's Old Cattleman; but I have no doubt that in time he would be
heard to say all the good things in that volume. I myself have
note-books full of just such gorgeous language, some of the best of
which I have used elsewhere, and so will not repeat here.[1]

This vividness manifests itself quite as often in the selection of the
apt word as in the construction of elaborate phrases with a
half-humorous intention. A cowboy once told me of the arrival of a
tramp by saying, "He SIFTED into camp." Could any verb be more
expressive? Does not it convey exactly the lazy, careless,
out-at-heels shuffling gait of the hobo? Another in the course of
description told of a saloon scene, "They all BELLIED UP TO the bar."
Again, a range cook, objecting to purposeless idling about his fire,
shouted: "If you fellows come MOPING around here any more, I'LL SURE
MAKE YOU HARD TO CATCH!" "Fish in that pond, son? Why, there's some
fish in there big enough to rope," another advised me. "I quit
shoveling," one explained the story of his life, "because I couldn't
see nothing ahead of shoveling but dirt." The same man described
ploughing as, "Looking at a mule's tail all day." And one of the most
succinct epitomes of the motifs of fiction was offered by an old fellow
who loo