and not even in her own school room had she ever found herself
the focus of a cleaner, more unstinted admiration. For the
outdoors West takes off its hat reverently to women worthy of
respect, especially when they are young and friendly.

Helen Messiter had come to Wyoming because the call of adventure,
the desire for experience outside of rutted convention, were
stirring her warm-blooded youth. She had seen enough of life
lived in a parlor, and when there came knocking at her door a
chance to know the big, untamed outdoors at first hand she had at
once embraced it like a lover. She was eager for her new life,
and she set out skillfully to make these men tell her what she
wanted to know. To them, of course, it was an old story, and
whatever of romance it held was unconscious. But since she wanted
to talk of the West they were more than ready to please her.

So she listened, and drew them out with adroit questions when it
was necessary. She made them talk of life on the open range, of
rustlers and those who lived outside the law in the upper
Shoshone country, of the deadly war waging between the cattle and
sheep industries.

"Are there any sheep near the Lazy D ranch?" she asked, intensely
interested in Soapy's tale of how cattle and sheep could no more
be got to mix than oil and water.

For an instant nobody answered her question; then Soapy replied,
with what seemed elaborate carelessness:

"Ned Bannister runs a bunch of about twelve thousand not more'n