Bully Bill, his mouth gaped open, was surveying the applicant from head to foot, his trained eye travelling from the top of the sleekly-brushed blond hair, the smoothly-shaven cheek, down the still surprisingly dapper form to the thin shoes that were so painfully inadequate for the trail. Sandy was doubled up in a knot, howling with fiendish glee. Bully Bill spat.
“I d-don’t m-mind roughing it at all,” continued the applicant, wistfully. “D-don’t judge me by my clothes. Fact is, old man, they happen to be all I’ve g-got, you see. B-but I’m quite c-competent to—”
Bully Bill said dreamily, looking out into space, and as if thinking aloud.
“We ain’t as tough as we’re cracked up to be. Of course, they’s one or two stunts you got to learn on a cattle ranch—rawnch—beggin’ your pardon—”
“That’s quite all right, old man. Don’t mention it. Is there a chance then for me?”
There was not a trace of a smile on Bully Bill’s face as he solemnly looked down into the anxious blue eyes of the applicant.
“They’s the makin’s of a damn fine cowboy in you,” he said.
“I say!”
A smile broke all over the somewhat pinched face of the strange tramp. That smile was so engaging, so sunny, so boyish that the cowpuncher returned it with a characteristic grin of his own.
“D-you really mean to say that I’m engaged?”
“You betchu.”
“Thanks awfully, old man,” cried the other cordially, and extended his white hand, which gripped the horny one of the cowpuncher, at rest on his leather-clad knee.
Bully Bill rode off at a slow lope, and as he rode, he steadily chewed. Once or twice he grunted, and once he slapped his leg and made a sound that was oddly like a hoarse guffaw. In the wake of the loitering horse, carrying his now sadly-battered grip in his hand, the Englishman plugged along, and as he came he whistled a cheery strain of music.
II
Sandy made three somersaults of glee on the turf, and at his last turnover, his head came into contact with something hard. He rubbed said head, and at the same time observed that which had pained him. It was a large, old-fashioned gold locket, studded with rubies and diamonds.
“Holy Salmon!” ejaculated the highly-elated boy. In an instant he had seized the bridle of his horse, and was on him. He went up the hill on a run, and began calling outside the house, while still on horse.
“Hilda! I say, Hilda! Come on out! Looka here what I found!”
A girl, skin bronzed by sun and wind, with chocolate-coloured eyes and hair and a certain free grace of motion and poise, came on to the wide verandah. Sandy had ridden his horse clear to the railing, and now he excitedly held up the trinket in his hand, and then tossed it to Hilda, who caught it neatly in her own. Turning it over, the girl examined to find with admiration and curiosity, and, with feminine intuition, she found the spring and opened the locket. Within, the lovely, pictured face of a woman in low-cut evening dress, looked back from the frame. On the opposite side, a lock of dead-gold hair curled behind the glass.
Sandy had leaped off his horse, and now was excitedly grasping after the treasure.
“Wher’d you find it, Sandy?”
“Down in the lower pasture. Betchu its his girl! Say, Hilda, he’s a scream. You’d oughter’ve been there. He came along the road all dolled up in city clothes, and—look! Oh, my God-frey! Look ut him, Hilda!”
In an ecstasy of derision and delight, Sandy pointed.
Hand shading his eyes, the stranger was gazing across the wide-spreading panorama of gigantic hills, etched against a sky of sheerest blue, upon which the everlasting sun glowed.
“By George!” exclaimed the new “hand” of the O Bar O, “what a tophole view! Never saw anything to beat it. Give you my word, it b-b-beats S-switzerland. When I was tramping along the road, I th-thought that was a good one on us at home, ’bout this being the Land of Promise, you know, b-but now, by George! I’m hanged if I don’t think you’re right. A chap cannot look across at a view like that and not feel jolly well uplifted!”
There was a ring of men closing in about the new arrival, for it was the noon hour, and Hootmon had hurried them along from bunkhouse and corral. At the stranger’s stream of eloquence to Bully Bill anent the beauties of nature in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, “Pink-eyed Jake” swooned away in the arms of Hootmon. A gale of unbridled laughter burst from a dozen throats. The men held their sides and leaned forward the better to scan this new specimen of the human family. Hands on hips, they “took his number” and pronounced him internally a freak of nature.
To the door of the cook-car, rolled the immense form of Tom Chum Lee, the Chinese cook who dominated the grub-car of O Bar O. With a vast smile of benignant humour directed upon his “boys,” Lee summoned all hands to chow, by means of a great cow bell, that he waved generously back and forth.
With immense satisfaction and relish, the newcomer was taking in all of the colour and atmosphere of the ranch. The fact that he himself was an object of derisive mirth to the outfit, troubled him not at all.
A skirt—pink—flirted around the side of the house, and outlined against the blue of the sky, the slim form of a young girl shone on the steps of the ranch house. The Englishman had a glimpse of wide, dark eyes, and a generous red mouth, through which gleamed the whitest of teeth. But it was her voice, with its shrill edge of impudent young
