“We have only cold things,” I explained, not only thrilled at an encounter with a real live cowboy but attracted by his distinctly pleasing personality. He had no manner at all and yet in his absence of self-consciousness there was very real dignity. And in contrast to the copper-brown of his face his unsmiling eyes were so blue that their color was startling. I had been wrapped in admiration of E. M.’s color, which I thought as brown as sun could make a man, but beside this other of the plains, E. M. looked almost pallid.
“I don’t aim to have you deny yourself nothin’ for me!” he hesitated.
“Oh, we have lots of food!” said Celia. “Cold food, though, you know; nothing hot.”
For the first time his eyes crinkled into a half smile:
“The grub we get is hot, which is most of the virchoos you can claim for it.”
Meanwhile E. M. had proffered an open box of eggs and sandwiches. The other dismounted, threw the reins forward over his horse’s neck, and accepted our hospitality. He turned a paper plate and a thin tin spoon in his hands as though dubious of such flimsy utility until he discovered it was to be used for ice cream. Hard frozen ice cream under the midday sun and fifty miles from where it could be bought, interested him.
“I’ve seen bottles for liquids, but I’ve never seen one like that for solids. It sure is cold!” he said. And with its coldness, he quite thawed. He did not look more than thirty, yet talked quite a while about the old times that he himself remembered, generalities for the most part, but with a lingering keenness in describing the qualifications that men on the range used to have.
Also he told us a string of yarns—that may have been true—or they may have been merely the type of divertissement whereby Westerners love to entertain themselves at the expense of Eastern credulity. One amusing story, at any rate, was of the hold-up of a passenger stage by a single masked man. Afterwards when the sheriff and his men followed his horse’s tracks, they suddenly disappeared as though the earth had swallowed them. It had. They found the thief’s buried boots with horseshoes nailed on them on a path that had too many footprints to single out one to follow.
He added quite regretfully that cow-punching was not what it used to be. Cattle were getting tame and the ranches were enclosed in wire fences and life was so soft and easy, that cattle raising was no more exciting than raising sheep. Finally he volunteered:
“I’ve got folks in Massachusetts; my brother Sam’s in Boston.”