For two days I had tramped, half starved, toward the rising sun, with the hope of reaching some cattle ranch near Denver. On the morning of the third day, as I was trudging through a thick undergrowth, I was suddenly startled by a woman's voice:—
"You didn't happen to spy a little speckled heifer back yonder, did you, stranger?"
It is said that upon the approach of a human being the first impulse of a man who has been lost in the woods is that biblically ascribed to the wicked, namely, "to flee when no man pursueth." But at this time I was too far gone with hunger and weariness to flee from anything.
I simply leaned against a tree trunk and awaited the appearance of the voice's owner. She came riding a bronco across the crest of a hillock. She was slight and wiry, and she wore her huge sombrero and man's canvas shooting-coat with an air that at first suggested the cowboy. A later glimpse of feminine drapery, however, proclaimed her something infinitely more interesting,—a real Rocky Mountain cow-girl in all her glory.
"No," I answered weakly to her repeated question as to the heifer's whereabouts. "No, I've seen neither hoof nor hide of your heifer, which is lucky for you, as I should probably have eaten it if I had."
"You do look hungry," said the strange horsewoman; and as she spoke the bold lines of her aquiline face relaxed into an expression of womanly solicitude.
"Here, take this," she added in a business-like tone, producing from a bag that lay, meal sack fashion, across her saddle, a can of pressed beef and a square foot or so of corn bread. "No," as I tried to speak, "never mind explanations. Have some lunch with me and talk afterwards; that is, if you ain't afraid to eat with a cow-girl.
"You see," she continued, when we were comfortably seated on a moss-grown log that served as a whole set of dining-room furniture, "I know myself what it is to get lost and nearly starve to death. 'Having experienced misfortune myself, I know how to pity others.' "
I choked over a morsel of corn bread and stared at my companion with ill-bred astonishment. A cow-girl who quoted Virgil, even in a translation, was something not dreamed of in my philosophy.
"Yes, I don't wonder that you look surprised," said my hostess good-naturedly. "I suppose I don't look as though I was up in the classics, but the fact is I'm a graduate of Iowa Wesleyan University, and I've studied Latin, Shakespeare, geometry, and all the rest.