an equal. And something until now untouched,
unguessed, that had lived on in his boy's heart, stirred and awoke and
thrilled. To-night, with a vague sense of guilt which made the
escapade but the more electric, while his daughter had imagined that he
was getting himself sedately into his long-tailed, sedate nightgown, he
was beaming warmly upon the highly entertained group of ranch hands
down in the men's bunk-house, whither, by the way, he had been led by
Barbee.

There comes now and then to such an isolation as Desert Valley a boon
from the gods in the guise of a tenderfoot. But never tenderfoot,
agreed the oldest Mexican with the youngest Texan, like this one. They
sat lined in back-tilted chairs about the four walls and studied him
with eyes that were at all times appreciative, often downright grave.
His ignorance was astounding, his hunger for information amazing. He
was a man from Mars who knew all that was to be known in his own world
but brought into this strange planet a frank and burning curiosity.
Barbee's chaps delighted him; a hair rope awoke in his soul an
avaricious hunger for a hair rope of his own; commonplace ranch
matters, like branding and marking and breeding and weaning and
breaking, evoked countless eager questions. For so academic a man, the
strange thing about him was his attitude toward these day labourers; he
looked upon them as brothers; not only that, but as older brothers. He
forgot his own wisdom in his thirst to partake of theirs. He gave the
full of his admiration to a man whom he had seen that day cast a wide
loop of rope about the horns of a running steer.

He was making discoveries hand over fist; perhaps therein lay a
sufficient reason why the man of science in him was fascinated. True,
those discoveries which he made were new only to him; yet one might say
the same of America and Columbus. For one thing, it dawned on him that
here was a new and excellent technical vocabulary; he stored away in
his brain strange words as a squirrel sticks nuts and acorns into a
hole. Hondo, tapaderos, bad hombre, tecolote, bronco, maverick,
side-winder--rapaciously he seized upon them as bits of the argot of
fairyland. He watched the expert roll the brown tube of a cigarette
and yearned for the skill; he observed tricks in riding, and there was
within him the compelling urge to ride like that; not a trifle escaped
his shark-eyes, be it the way the men combed their hair, mounted their
ho