“Now why” she asked herself slowly, “should that make any difference? Wouldn’t he be just as nice—just as pleasant to talk to?”
She sat a long time holding her two braids in her hands, twirling the ends around her fingers, thinking.
Why was she so pleased with this stranger, she wondered?
She had seen many men in her life—there were the cowboys from the Upper Country whom she saw at Cordova, nearly every time she went there, there was McKane, and Sheriff Price Selwood.
She liked the sheriff. He was a kindly man under his stern exterior, she knew. His eyes were direct, like Fair’s somewhat, and he had the same seeming of quiet strength. He had been at the cabin quite a few times after her father’s death, asking all sorts of questions about his manner of life, his experience in the hills, and so forth. Yes—Fair was a little like the sheriff, only more so—oh, very much more so—quiet, steady, one whose word you would take without question.
He was different, that was all—different.
He had not always lived in the hills, that was certain. She lay down once more and tried to sleep, but her eyes would not obey her will. They came open each time she closed them to see this man standing at the jut of stone, his hand on the black’s bit—at the pool by the cave below where he bade her good-bye—still there when she looked back from far down the cañon.
She heard Old John, the big plymouth-rock rooster, crow for midnight from his perch in the rafters of the stable—and again at false dawn a little while before daylight.
“Well, I’d like to know what ails me,” she thought to herself as she got up with the first grey shafts above Mystery Ridge, “I never stayed awake all night in my life before.”
It was indicative of the great good health and strength there was in her that she felt no ill effects from the unusual experience. She brushed her hair and pinned it neatly around her head in a shining coronet, put on a clean denim dress from the clothes-press in the corner, laced up the heavy shoes she had to wear about her man’s work, and went softly out to light the kitchen fire, to draw a fresh pail of water and to stand lost in rapt adoration of the pageant of coming day. She washed her face and hands in the basin and came blooming from the cold water, content with her lot, happy to be alive—and to know that Brand and Sonny Fair were in Blue Stone Cañon, and that they called themselves her friends.