finger into those
hills, though they're meant to be a hundred miles away. Well, it serves
me right, I guess. My father warned me about color. And I never saw any
good pictures but his, and that was years ago. I've forgotten how they
ought to look. He sold all his when I was young--all but one."

"You've done well, considering that."

"He said I must learn to draw first--really to draw--and he taught me to
do that. I _can_ draw. But black and white is so dingy, and these colors
are always nagging you, daring you to try them. If I could only learn to
get real air between me and those hills. I wonder, now, if my colors
seem like those Navajo blankets to you." He flung himself away from the
canvases like an offended horse.

"Let me see your black-and-whites," she suggested hastily.

"Oh, those! They don't amount to much, but I'll show you." He thrust
aside the canvases and opened a portfolio on the chair.

She saw at a glance that he had been right when he said he could draw.
She let her surprise have play and expanded in the pleasure of honest
praise. She had not realized how her former disappointment had taken her
aback. But he could draw. Here were true lines and true modeling, not
dead, as he had warned her, but quick with life, portrayed not only with
truth but with a handling all his own, free from imitative touches. He
had achieved difficult feats of action, of foreshortening, with an
apparently effortless facility--the duck of a horse's head to avoid the
thrown rope; the poise of the man who had cast it; the braced tension of
a cow pony holding a roped and thrown steer while his rider dismounted;
the airy grace of Red Phinney at work with a stubborn broncho, coming to
earth on his stiff-legged mount and raking its side from shoulder to
flank with an effective spur. There was humor in them, the real feeling
in one of the last. Mrs. Laithe lingered over this.

"It's Beulah Pierce's wife in that flower garden of hers," the artist
explained. "It seems kind of sad when she goes out there alone
sometimes. You know how tired she generally is, and how homesick she's
been for twenty years or so--'all gaunted up,' as Ben says, like every
ranchman's wife--they have to work so hard. And in the house she's apt
to be peevish and scold Beulah and the boys like she despised them. But
when she goes out into that garden----"

"Tell me," said his listener, after waiting discreetly a moment.

"Well, she's mighty different. She