“I’m not riding. I’m looking,” May said in a low absent tone. “Look!”
She waved a gloved hand in a gesture that swept half the horizon. Robin looked. He saw far off the dark line of the Missouri, flanked by the crisscross gashes of the Bad Lands. He saw far beyond the river the Moccasin Mountains, the Snowies, the Belts, pale bluish dabs like so many mirages. He didn’t look for anything in particular. He didn’t expect to see anything of sensational import such as a stampeding herd, or vigilantes pursuing train robbers, or cloud-bursts flooding low ground nor indeed any of the high lights which in other times and places are presumed to be shed almost continuously upon the cattle country. Robin was not obtuse. He had a dim comprehension of what the girl meant when she said “Look!” in that low, tense voice. Robin himself often paused on high ground to look away into those noble spaces—to wonder——
May looked inquiringly at Robin now.
“What do you see away off there?” she asked.
“Room. Lots of room. Room to move around without knockin’ your elbows against somebody or something you don’t happen to like. And it’s pretty—no, that ain’t the right word. You know what I mean, though, I guess,” Robin finished lamely. “I like lots of room, myself.”
“Yes, I know what you mean.” She rested her hand on the saddle horn before her and her tone was reflective. “I just wondered if you saw it, or felt it without seeing it. Space and freedom! Freedom without stint and space without limit,” she murmured more to herself than to the cow-puncher beside her. “I wish I were a poet.”
She lifted her eyes again to Robin with that slow, faint, friendly smile.
“Yes,” she said, “I wondered if you recognized loveliness when you saw it, or if all this great country only means to you grass and water for cows. Free pasture. A chance to make money.”
“Cows,” Robin affirmed, “is part of the game. Nobody could live on just scenery. But I guess I’d like to look off across the prairie when the sun’s shining on it anyhow. It’d be just as good to look at if there wasn’t a cow in Montana. Only if there was no cattle here, we wouldn’t be here to look.”
“That’s true, of course,” May admitted. “I wonder if cow-punchers generally have that feeling about this country they go galloping over?”