Seth was toiling slowly along a furrow back of his plow, bending sidewise with the force of the wind, not resentfully that it persisted in making it so difficult for him to earn his bread, for resentment was not in his nature, besides which, Seth loved the wind,—but humming a little tune, something soft and reminiscent about his old Kentucky home, with its chorus of "Fare you well, my lady," when a broncho, first a mere speck on the horizon ahead of him, then larger and larger, rushed out of the wind from across the prairie with flashing eyes and distended nostrils, and lunged toward him.
At first he thought it was a wild broncho, untamed and riderless; but as his eyes became accustomed to dust and sunlight, he discovered that the saddle held a girl.
For the moment she had bent herself to the broncho's mane, which had the effect, together with the haze produced by the wind-blown dust, of rendering the animal apparently riderless.
Seth drew up his mule and halted.
At the same time the broncho was jerked with a sudden rein that sent him back on his haunches, his front feet pawing the air.
His rider, apparently accustomed to this pose, clung to him with the persistency of a fly to fly paper, righted him, swung herself from the saddle and stood before Seth, a tall, slim girl of twelve, a girl of complexion brown as berries, of dark eyes heavily fringed with thick lashes and dusky hair tinged redly with sunburn. Her hair, one of her beauties, blew about her ears in tangled curls that were unconfined by hat or bonnet.
She smiled at him, showing rows of rice-like teeth, of an exaggerated white in contrast with the sunburn of her face.
"Hello," she said.
"Hello," said Seth in return.