One evening in May,a tall lithe figure crept the southern base of the mountain range,following its curves with cautious feet as if fearful of discovery.It was a young man of twenty-one or two,bronzed,free of movement,agile of step.His face was firm,handsome and open,although at present a wish to escape observation caused the hazel eyes to dart here and there restlessly,while the mouth tightened in an aspect of sternness.This air of wild resolution was heightened by the cowboy's ordinary gannents,and the cowboy's indispensable belt well-stocked with weapons.
On reaching the spur that formed the western jaw of the horseshoe,he crept on hands and knees,but satisfied by searching glances that the inner expanse was deserted,he half rose and stole shadow-like along the granite wall,until he had reached the hill-island that concealed the cove.Again falling on hands and knees,he drew himself slowly up among the huge flat rocks that covered the hill in all directions.In a brief time he had traversed it,and a view of the cove was suddenly unrolled below.A few yards from Brick Willock's dugout,now stood a neat log cabin,and not far from the door of this cabin was a girl of about 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 innumerable particles of light.It seemed to glow from its very fineness,its silkiness--the kind of hair one is prompted to touch,to feel if it is really that way!The face was more wonderful,because it told many things that can not be expressed in mere hair-language.There was the seal of innocence on the lips,the proof of fearlessness in the eyes,the touch of thought on the brow,the sign of purpose about the resolute little chin.The slender brown hands spoke of life in the open air,and the glow of the cheeks told of burning suns.Her form,her attitude,spoke not only of instinctive grace,but of a certain wildness in admirable harmony with the surrounding scene.Somehow,the ruggedness of the mountains and the desolate solitudes of the plains were reflected from her face.
The young man gazed as if his thirst would never be appeased.The flavor of nights about the camp-fire and other nights spent in driving sleet,also days when the first flowers come and the wide beds of the desert rivers are swollen with overbrimming floods;the cruel exposure of winter,the thrilling balminess of early spring--all spoke to him again from that motionless figure.He recalled companions of his boyhood and youth,but they were not akin to this child of the desert mountains.Still more alien were those of the saloon stations,the haunts at the outskirts of civilization.It seemed to him that in this young girl,who bad the look and poise of a woman,he had found what hitherto he had vainly sought in the wilderness--the beauty and the charm of it,refined and separated from its sordidness and its uncouthness--in a word,from all that was base and ugly.It was for this that he had left his home in the East.Here was typified that loveliness of the unbroken wilderness without its profanity,its drunkenness,its obscenity,its terrible hardships.
