Sandy had leaped off his horse, and now was excitedly grasping after the treasure.
“Wher’d you find it, Sandy?”
“Down in the lower pasture. Betchu its his girl! Say, Hilda, he’s a scream. You’d oughter’ve been there. He came along the road all dolled up in city clothes, and—look! Oh, my God-frey! Look ut him, Hilda!”
In an ecstasy of derision and delight, Sandy pointed.
Hand shading his eyes, the stranger was gazing across the wide-spreading panorama of gigantic hills, etched against a sky of sheerest blue, upon which the everlasting sun glowed.
“By George!” exclaimed the new “hand” of the O Bar O, “what a tophole view! Never saw anything to beat it. Give you my word, it b-b-beats S-switzerland. When I was tramping along the road, I th-thought that was a good one on us at home, ’bout this being the Land of Promise, you know, b-but now, by George! I’m hanged if I don’t think you’re right. A chap cannot look across at a view like that and not feel jolly well uplifted!”
There was a ring of men closing in about the new arrival, for it was the noon hour, and Hootmon had hurried them along from bunkhouse and corral. At the stranger’s stream of eloquence to Bully Bill anent the beauties of nature in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, “Pink-eyed Jake” swooned away in the arms of Hootmon. A gale of unbridled laughter burst from a dozen throats. The men held their sides and leaned forward the better to scan this new specimen of the human family. Hands on hips, they “took his number” and pronounced him internally a freak of nature.
To the door of the cook-car, rolled the immense form of Tom Chum Lee, the Chinese cook who dominated the grub-car of O Bar O. With a vast smile of benignant humour directed upon his “boys,” Lee summoned all hands to chow, by means of a great cow bell, that he waved generously back and forth.
With immense satisfaction and relish, the newcomer was taking in all of the colour and atmosphere of the ranch. The fact that he himself was an object of derisive mirth to the outfit, troubled him not at all.
A skirt—pink—flirted around the side of the house, and outlined against the blue of the sky, the slim form of a young girl shone on the steps of the ranch house. The Englishman had a glimpse of wide, dark eyes, and a generous red mouth, through which gleamed the whitest of teeth. But it was her voice, with its shrill edge of impudent young mirth that sent the colour to the pinched cheeks of the new hand of O Bar O. There was in it, despite its mockery, a haughty accent of contempt.