in. He knows every mile of Aravaipa Valley an' the Pinaleno
country. He's ranged from Tombstone to Douglas. He hed shot bad white
men an' bad Greasers before he was twenty-one. He's seen some life, Nels
has. My sixty years ain't nothin'; my early days in the Staked Plains
an' on the border with Apaches ain't nothin' to what Nels has seen an'
lived through. He's just come to be part of the desert; you might say
he's stone an' fire an' silence an' cactus an' force. He's a man, Miss
Majesty, a wonderful man. Rough he'll seem to you. Wal, I'll show you
pieces of quartz from the mountains back of my ranch an' they're thet
rough they'd cut your hands. But there's pure gold in them. An' so it is
with Nels an' many of these cowboys.

"An' there's Price--Monty Price. Monty stands fer Montana, where he
hails from. Take a good look at him, Miss Majesty. He's been hurt, I
reckon. Thet accounts fer him bein' without hoss or rope; an' thet limp.
Wal, he's been ripped a little. It's sure rare an seldom thet a cowboy
gets foul of one of them thousands of sharp horns; but it does happen."

Madeline saw a very short, wizened little man, ludicrously bow-legged,
with a face the color and hardness of a burned-out cinder. He was
hobbling by toward the wagon, and one of his short, crooked legs
dragged.

"Not much to look at, is he?" went on Stillwell. "Wal; I know it's
natural thet we're all best pleased by good looks in any one, even a
man. It hedn't ought to be thet way. Monty Price looks like hell. But
appearances are sure deceivin'. Monty saw years of ridin' along the
Missouri bottoms, the big prairies, where there's high grass an'
sometimes fires. In Montana they have blizzards that freeze cattle
standin' in their tracks. An' hosses freeze to death. They tell me thet
a drivin' sleet in the face with the mercury forty below is somethin' to
ride against. You can't get Monty to say much about cold. All you hev
to do is to watch him, how he hunts the sun. It never gets too hot fer
Monty. Wal, I reckon he was a little more prepossessin' once. The story
thet come to us about Monty is this: He got caught out in a prairie fire
an' could hev saved himself easy, but there was a lone ranch right in
the line of fire, an' Monty knowed the rancher was away, an' his wife
an' baby was home. He knowed, too, the way the wind was, thet the
ranch-house would burn. It was a long chance he was takin'. But he went
over, put the woman up behind him, wrapped t