it, laddie," he said gently, a lean brown hand
resting lightly on the boy's square shoulder. "A man can't see what is
on the cards until they're tipped, but it's always a fair gamble that
between dawn and dusk I'll gather up my string of colts and crowd on.
If I do, you'll want to come along?"

He smiled at young Burkitt's eagerness and turned away toward the
ranch-house and Bayne Trevors, thus putting an early end to an
enthusiastic acquiescence. Tommy watched the tall man moving swiftly
away through the brightening dawn.

"They ain't no more men ever foaled like him," meditated Tommy, in an
approval so profound as to be little less than out-and-out devotion.

And, indeed, one might ride up and down the world for many a day and
not find a man who was Bud Lee's superior in "the things that count."
As tall as most, with sufficient shoulders, a slender body,
narrow-hipped, he carried himself as perhaps his forebears walked in a
day when open forests or sheltered caverns housed them, with a lithe
gracefulness born of the perfect play of superb physical development.
His muscles, even in the slightest movement, flowed liquidly; he had
slipped from his place on the corral gate less like a man than like
some great, splendid cat. The skin of hands, face, throat, was very
dark, whether by inheritance or because of long exposure to sun and
wind, it would have been difficult to say. The eyes were dark, very
keen, and yet reminiscently grave. From under their black brows they
had the habit of appearing to be reluctantly withdrawn from some great
distance to come to rest, steady and calm, upon the man with whom he
chanced to be speaking. Such are the serene, dispassionate eyes of one
who for many months of the year goes companionless, save for what
communion he may find in the silent passes of the mountains, in the
wide sweep of the meadow-lands or in the soul of his horse.

The gaunt, sure-footed form was lost to Tommy's eyes; Lee had passed
beyond the clump of wild lilacs whose glistening, heart-shaped leaves
screened the open court about which the ranch-house was built. A
strangely elaborate ranch-house, this one, set here so far apart from
the world of rich residences. There was a score of rooms in the great,
one-story, rambling edifice of rudely squared timbers set in
field-stone and cement, rooms now closed and locked; there were
flower-gardens still cultivated daily by Jose, the half-breed; a pretty
court with a f