Your Horse Nearly Ran Over Me.
Without intending to be disagreeable, Jeanette smiled. The following instant she slid off her horse.
"I am sorry to have alarmed you. Please explain to me why you are lying here in one of our fields asleep at this hour of the morning? I don't think we have seen each other before. Perhaps you are visiting one of our neighbors?"
Jeanette's sense of humor conquered her good manners.
This time she laughed aloud. Visitor or no visitor, why was he not in bed if he wished to sleep?
Seated in as disconsolate an attitude and wearing as aggrieved an expression as if he had been a child, Jeanette beheld a tall, thin boy with light hair curling close about a high, blue-veined forehead. He had blue eyes, a well-cut nose. It was his mouth, Jeanette decided, which gave him the infantile appearance. The lips were full and pouting as a spoiled girl's.
"I am glad you consider me amusing," he replied, a little sullenly. "I am not sure whether I am a visitor, or whether I have to live for some time in this plagued western country. I'd almost rather be dead than stay here many months. There is nothing to see, nothing to do. I feel as if I were a thousand miles from anywhere."
Jeanette glanced upward.
The sun had risen and was shining in the full golden glory of early summer morning. The fields planted in alfalfa or in grains were purple and green, the rolling prairies were velvet swards, the edges of the desert lines of silver.