t, the signs and trails and
water-holes where good hunting lay, and the bad stretches of field and
flood to be avoided. As usual, he fought shy of the women. He was
still too badly scared to come to close quarters with the dazzling and
resplendent creatures his own millions made accessible.

They looked and longed, but he so concealed his timidity that he had
all the seeming of moving boldly among them. Nor was it his wealth
alone that attracted them. He was too much a man, and too much an
unusual type of man. Young yet, barely thirty-six, eminently handsome,
magnificently strong, almost bursting with a splendid virility, his
free trail-stride, never learned on pavements, and his black eyes,
hinting of great spaces and unwearied with the close perspective of the
city dwellers, drew many a curious and wayward feminine glance. He
saw, grinned knowingly to himself, and faced them as so many dangers,
with a cool demeanor that was a far greater personal achievement than
had they been famine, frost, or flood.

He had come down to the States to play the man's game, not the woman's
game; and the men he had not yet learned. They struck him as
soft--soft physically; yet he divined them hard in their dealings, but
hard under an exterior of supple softness. It struck him that there
was something cat-like about them. He met them in the clubs, and
wondered how real was the good-fellowship they displayed and how
quickly they would unsheathe their claws and gouge and rend. "That's
the proposition," he repeated to himself; "what will they-all do when
the play is close and down to brass tacks?" He felt unwarrantably
suspicious of them. "They're sure slick," was his secret judgment; and
from bits of gossip dropped now and again he felt his judgment well
buttressed. On the other hand, they radiated an atmosphere of
manliness and the fair play that goes with manliness. They might gouge
and rend in a fight--which was no more than natural; but he felt,
somehow, that they would gouge and rend according to rule. This was the
impression he got of them--a generalization tempered by knowledge that
there was bound to be a certain percentage of scoundrels among them.

Several months passed in San Francisco during which time he studied the
game and its rules, and prepared himself to take a hand. He even took
private instruction in English, and succeeded in eliminating his worst
faults, though in moments of excitement he was prone to l