d of a cowboy."

And so they bandied words and laughs from one to another, while the
long white road stretched ahead, and rolled behind under the wheels.
The girl was plainly curious, interested, fascinated. Old Jim, after
the manner of westerners, was bent on making a conquest for Pan. And
Pan, trying hard to make himself appear only an ordinary and quite
worthless cowboy, succeeded only in giving an opposite impression.

The little lady rode three whole days on the driver's seat between Pan
and Wells. She made the hours flee. When the stage reached Las Vegas,
she got off with her father and turned in the crowd to wave good-by.
Her eyes were wistful with what might have been. They haunted Pan for
days, over the mountain uplands and on and on. Pan cherished the
experience. To him it had been just a chance meeting with a nice girl,
but somehow it opened his eyes to what he had missed. The way of
cowboys with girls was the one way in which he had been totally
unfamiliar. What he had missed was not the dancing and flirting and
courting that cowboys loved so well, but something he could not quite
grasp. It belonged to the never-fading influence of his mother; and
likewise it had some inscrutable association with little Lucy Blake.
Little? Surely she could not be little now. She was a grown girl, a
young woman like this Emily Newman, beautiful perhaps, with all the
nameless charms women had for men. Pan grew conscious of a mounting
eagerness to see Lucy, and each day during the ride across the desert
the feeling augmented, and with it a bewilderment equally
incomprehensible to him.

New Mexico was strange and new. He saw the desert through eyes
intensified by emotion. He knew the plains from Montana to Texas. But
this was different country, with its stretches of valley, its walls of
red and yellow, its strange shafts of rock, its amber ranges, and far
away on every horizon the dim purple and white of great peaks were
magnificent.

The Mormon ranches were scattered along the few green valleys. Cattle
were scarce, only a few herds dotting the endless sweeps of green sage
and bleached grass. As he traveled farther westward, however, the
numbers of wild horses increased until they ran into the thousands.

Horses had meant more to Pan than anything. In his wanderings up and
down the western slope of the prairie land east of the Rockies he had
often encountered wild horses, and had enjoyed many a chase afte