She rose, and we held out our hands.
"No, gentlemen; I won't take your hands till that debt is cancelled. The piano and the team will go some ways towards it. Good-bye, and-- thank you."
VII
AN EXPERIMENT
My brother and I had just ridden off the range, when Uncle Jake told us that a tramp was hanging about the corrals and wished to speak with us.
"He looks like hell," concluded Uncle Jake.
We found him, a minute later, curled up on a heap of straw on the shady side of our big barn. He got up as we approached, and stared at us with a curious derisive intentness of glance, slightly disconcerting.
"You are Englishmen," he said quietly.
The man's voice was charming, with that unmistakable quality which challenges attention even in Mayfair, and enthrals it in the wilderness. We nodded, and he continued easily: "It is late, and some twenty-six miles, so I hear, to the nearest town. May I spend the night in your barn. I don't smoke--in barns."