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.