The girl looked him straight in the eyes.
“We are going to be great friends,” she said with a rare smile. “You must invite your mother and sister out here.”
“I certainly will, and I am going to send for my ninety horse-power car.”
“Oh, that will be fine,” the girl cried with enthusiasm. “I am just crazy about riding fast. You must teach me how to drive. We will have great fun with it. We have a negro cook and the boys call him Smoke, he is so black. Bud took him on a trip to Chicago last summer and to show Smoke a good time he hired a high powered car and told the chauffeur to drive the limit.
“Well, Smoke never got over raving about that ride. Bud said his eyes fairly popped out of his head and he was scared stiff. When he got back home he told the boys in the mess room that Bud would never ‘get him in one of them go-devils again’!”
Mason laughed heartily at her narrative.
The girl touched him on the shoulder and pointed in the direction where he had seen the cattle grazing. He made out a horseman coming their way.
“That’s Tex,” she said, “one of our boys, I can tell by the way he rides.”
The rider halted and waited for them to come up. Mason noticed the cowboy took his hat off when the girl spoke to him.
“Tex, this is Jack Mason from New York,” she said, introducing the Easterner.