hearty goodwill in the rounds of applause that at frequent intervals
had interrupted the speech of the little town's Mayor. A born
horsewoman, she had watched with breathless admiration the onrush of
the loose-rein riders--the graceful swaying of their bodies, and the
flapping of soft hat brims, as their horses approached with a thunder
of pounding hoofs. Her eyes had sparkled at the reckless swerving of
the horses when it seemed that the next moment the back-surging crowd
would be trampled into the ground. She had wondered at the precision
with which the Texan's loop fell; and had joined heartily in the
laughter that greeted the ludicrous and red-faced indignation with
which a fat woman had crawled from beneath a coach whither she had
sought refuge from the onrush of thundering hoofs.

In the mind of the girl, cowboys had always been associated with motion
picture theatres, where concourses of circus riders in impossible
regalia performed impossible feats of horsemanship in the unravelling
of impossible plots. She had never thought of them as real--or, if she
had, it was as a vanished race, like the Aztec and the buffalo.

But here were real cowboys in the flesh: Open-throated, bronzed man,
free and unrestrained as the air they breathed--men whose very
appearance called to mind boundless open spaces, purple sage, blue
mountains, and herds of bellowing cattle. Here were men bound by no
petty and meaningless conventions--men the very sight of whom served to
stimulate and intensify the longing to see for herself the land beyond
the valley rims--to slip into a saddle and ride, and ride, and ride--to
feel the beat of the rain against her face, and the whip of the wind,
and the burning rays of the sun, and at night to lie under the winking
stars and listen to the howl of the coyotes.