"A what?"
"Cowboy."
"But I thought that cowboys and dodos and mammoths and all those things were extinct—swept away in the nineteenth century. A real live cowboy?"
The lad blushed. "I was raised in the saddle, and it's a three-hundred-mile ride across the ranche."
"But cows!"
The boy laughed at Sydney now. "No, reindeer, and musk oxen. We have three hundred thousand head of stock, besides raising pelts."
"What are pelts?"
"Silver fox skins, sea otter, beaver, musquash."
The boy was straining every fibre of his being to win acceptance from this courtly man of the town.
"What a jolly outdoor life," said Sydney; "tell me more, do you——"