e corners flapping
down on the front of his blue woollen shirt, had been a white-dotted
handkerchief of scarlet silk; and about his waist was knotted a long
scarf of the same colour; dogskin "chapps" he had worn, fronted with the
thick yellowish hair outside; his saddle-bags, back of the saddle,
showing the same fur; his saddle had been of stamped Spanish leather
with a silver capping on the horn and on the circle of the cantle; and
on the right of the saddle she had seen the coils of a lariat of
plaited horsehair.

The picture of him stayed in her mind, the sturdy young figure,--rather
loose-jointed but with an easy grace of movement,--and the engaging
naturalness of his manner. But after all nothing had happened save the
passing of a stranger, and she must go alone back to her dream. Yet now
the dream might change; a strange youth might come riding out of the
east, sitting a sorrel horse with a star and a white hind ankle, a long
rangy neck and strong quarters; and he--the youth--would wear a broad,
gray hat, with a band of silver filigree, a scarlet kerchief at his
throat, a scarlet sash at his waist, and yellow dogskin "chapps."

Still, she thought, he could hardly have a place in the dream. The real
youth of the dream had been of an unearthly beauty, with a rose-leaf
complexion and lustrous curls massed above a brow of marble. The
stranger had not been of an unearthly beauty. To be sure, he was very
good to look at, with his wide-open blue eyes and his yellow hair, and
he had appeared uncommonly fresh and clean about the mouth when he
smiled at her. But she could not picture him sighing the right words of
love under a balcony in the moonlight. He had looked to be too intensely
business-like.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

_The Gentile Invasion_

When she came across the fields late in the afternoon, the strange
youth's horse was picketed where the bunch-grass grew high, and the
young man himself talked with her father by the corral bars. She had
never realised how old her father was, how weak, and small, and bent,
until she saw him beside this erect young fellow. Her heart went out to
the older man with a new sympathy as she saw his feebleness so sharply
in relief against the well-blooded, hard-muscled vigour of the younger.
When she would have passed them, her father called to her.

"Prudence, this is Mr. Ruel Follett. He will stay with us to-night."

The sombrero was off again and she felt the blue eyes seekin