In the swift current of humanity then streaming up and down the cattle range, the reputation of the Halfway House was carried far and near; and for fifty miles east and west, for five hundred miles north and south, the beauty of the girl at the Halfway House was matter of general story. This was a new sort of being, this stranger from another land, and when applied to her, all the standards of the time fell short or wide. About her there grew a saga of the cow range, and she was spoken of with awe from the Brazos to the Blue. Many a rude cowman made long pilgrimage to verify rumours he had heard of the personal beauty, the personal sweetness of nature, the personal kindness of heart, and yet the personal reserve and dignity of this new goddess, whose like was not to be found in all the wide realms of the range. Such sceptics came in doubt, but they remained silent and departed reverent. Wider and wider grew her circle of devoted friends—wild and desperate men who rarely knew a roof and whose hands stayed at no deed, but who knew with unerring accuracy the value of a real woman.
For each of these rude, silent, awkward range riders, who stammered in all speech except to men or horses, and who stumbled in all locomotion but that of the saddle, Mary Ellen had a kind spot in her soul, never ceasing to wonder as she did at the customs and traditions of their life. Pinky Smith, laid up at the Halfway House with a broken leg (with which he had come in the saddle for over fifty miles), was blither in bed than he had ever been at table. Ike Wallace, down with a fever at the same place, got reeling into saddle at dawn of a cheerless day, and rode himself and a horse to death that day in stopping a stampede. Pain they knew not, fear they had not, and duty was their only god. They told her, simply as children, of deeds which now caused a shudder, now set tingling the full blood of enthusiasm, and opened up unconsciously to her view a rude field of knight-errantry, whose principles sat strangely close with the best traditions of her own earlier land and time. They were knights-errant, and for all on the Ellisville trail there was but one lady. So hopeless was the case of each that they forbore to argue among themselves.
"No broadhorn there," said Pinky Smith, after he got well, and assumed the envied position of oracle on matters at the Halfway House. "That ain't no range stock, I want to tell you all. What in h——l she doin' out yer I give it up, but you can mark it down she ain't no common sort."
"Oh, she like enough got some beau back in the States," said another, grumblingly.
"Yes, er up to Ellis," said Pinky, sagely. "Thet lawyer feller up there, he come down to the ranch twict when I was there, and I 'low he's shinin' round some."
"Well, I dunno," said the other, argumentatively, as though to classify lawyers and cow-punchers in much the same category.
"But, pshaw!" continued Pinky. "He don't seem to hold no edge neither, fur's I could see. It was him that was a-doin' all the guessin'. She just a-standin' pat all the time, same fer him as fer everybody else. Reckon she ain't got no beau, an' don't want none."
"Beau be d——d!" said his friend. "Who said anything about beau?
First thing, feller's got to be fitten. Who's fitten?"
"That's right," said Pinky. "Yet I shore hope she's located yer fer keeps. Feller says, 'They's no place like home,' and it's several mile to another ranch like that'n', er to another gal like her."
"D——n the lawyer!" said the other, after a time of silence, as they rode on together; and Pinky made understanding reply.