ness way. She had met men who
ran to polysyllables and pompousness, but she had never known the
polysyllables to accompany so simple a manner. She had seen men slouching
around in old straw hats-and shoddy gray trousers and negligee shirts
with the tie askew, and the clothes had spelled poverty or shiftlessness.
Whereas they made Holman Sommers look like a great man indulging himself
in the luxury of old clothes on a holiday.

He seemed absolutely unconscious that he and his rattly buggy and the
harness on the horse were all very shabby, and that the horse was fat and
pudgy and scrawny of mane; and for that she admired him.

Before they reached the low adobe cabin, she felt that she was much
better acquainted with Holman Sommers than with Starr, whose name she
still did not know, although he had stayed an hour talking to Vic and
praising her cooking the night before. She did not, for all the time
she had spent with him, know anything definite about Starr, whereas
she presently knew a great deal about Holman Sommers, and approved of
all she knew.

He had a past which, she sensed vaguely, had been rather brilliant. He
must have been a war correspondent, because he compared the present great
war with the Japanese-Russian War and with the South African War, and he
seemed to have been right in the middle of both, or he could not have
spoken so intimately of them. He seemed to know all about the real,
underlying causes of them and knew just where it would all end, and what
nations would be drawn into it before they were through. He did not say
that he knew all about the war, but after he had spoken a few casual
sentences upon the subject Helen May felt that he knew a great deal more
than he said.

He also knew all about raising goats. He slid very easily, too, from the
war to goat-raising. He had about four hundred, and he gave her a lot of
valuable advice about the most profitable way in which to handle them.

When he saw Vic legging it along the slope behind the Basin to head off
Billy and his slavish nannies, he shook his head commiseratingly. "There
is not a scintilla of doubt in my mind," he told her gently, "that a
trained dog would be of immeasurable benefit to you. I fear you made a
grave mistake, Miss Stevenson, when you failed to possess yourself of a
good dog. I might go so far as to say that a dog is absolutely
indispensable to the successful handling of goats, or, for that matter,
of sheep, either." (He pron