The Dean's eyes twinkled, as they have a way of doing when you say
something that he likes. "I'd say it's a better reason why you should,"
he returned quietly.

Then he said to Phil, who, having dismissed his four-footed pupil, was
coming toward them:

"Phil, this man wants a job. Think we can use him?"

The young man looked at the stranger with unfeigned surprise and with a
hint of amusement, but gave no sign that he had ever seen him before.
The same natural delicacy of feeling that had prevented the cowboy from
discussing the man upon whose privacy he felt he had intruded that
evening of their meeting on the Divide led him now to ignore the
incident--a consideration which could not but command the strange man's
respect, and for which he looked his gratitude.

There was something about the stranger, too, that to Phil seemed
different. This tall, well-built fellow who stood before them so
self-possessed, and ready for anything, was not altogether like the
uncertain, embarrassed, half-frightened and troubled gentleman at whom
Phil had first laughed with thinly veiled contempt, and then had pitied.
It was as though the man who sat that night alone on the Divide had, out
of the very bitterness of his experience, called forth from within
himself a strength of which, until then, he had been only dimly
conscious. There was now, in his face and bearing, courage and decision
and purpose, and with it all a glint of that same humor that had made
him so bitterly mock himself. The Dean's philosophy touching the
possibilities of the man who laughs when he is hurt seemed in this
stranger about to be justified. Phil felt oddly, too, that the man was