make. The girl in picturesque hat of soft felt, riding with careless ease
and grace; horse, maiden, plain, bathed in a sea of silver.

More and more as she talked the man wondered how this girl reared in the
wilds had acquired a speech so free from grammatical errors. She was
apparently deeply ignorant, and yet with a very few exceptions she made
no serious errors in English. How was it to be accounted for?

He began to ply her with questions about herself, but could not find that
she had ever come into contact with people who were educated. She had not
even lived in any of the miserable little towns that flourish in the
wildest of the West, and not within several hundred miles of a city. Their
nearest neighbors in one direction had been forty miles away, she said,
and said it as if that were an everyday distance for a neighbor to live.

Mail? They had had a letter once that she could remember, when she was a
little girl. It was just a few lines in pencil to say that her mother's
father had died. He had been killed in an accident of some sort, working
in the city where he lived. Her mother had kept the letter and cried over
it till almost all the pencil marks were gone.

No, they had no mail on the mountain where their homestead was.

Yes, her father went there first because he thought he had discovered
gold, but it turned out to be a mistake; so, as they had no other place to
go to, and no money to go with, they had just stayed there; and her father
and brothers had been cow-punchers, but she and her mother had scarcely
ever gone away from home. There were the little children to care for; and,
when they died, her mother did not care to go, and would not let her go
far alone.