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.

For two years he had seen no one like the girl of the cove,
none--though he had seen women and girls of the settlements, often
enough--who even suggested her kind. Her dress, indeed, was plain
enough, and obviously chosen in cheerful ignorance of forms and
conventions, though the color, a delicate pink, was all he could
have wished. After all, the clothes revealed nothing except absence
from city shops and city standards.

That was wonderful hair, its brown tresses gleaming though untouched