Polly tried to comply, but she was too much interested in what was going on around her to give up either to sleep or to relaxation. The crackling of the fire and its wonderful odor, the little hushing noises of the birds going to rest, the gentle coming up of the moon and the myriads of stars, all were too fascinating to risk missing in sleep. Scott had gone after the horses and had tethered each by a long rope in a place where feeding could be attended to, and had come back to the fire and thrown on some more wood. He sat smoking with his feet nearly in the fire and his face lit by its glow. "I suppose you've spent lots of glorious nights in the open?" asked Polly, wistfully. "A good many. Some of them not so glorious, either. One night up in New Mexico----" he paused to light another cigarette. "Go on," demanded the girl. "When you say 'one night up in New Mexico' I feel just as I used to when my father used to say 'once upon a time.'" "Well, I don't know why I happened to think of this special night," grinned Scott, "except that on most of my out-of-door nights I've been by myself--out hunting and that kind of thing--and this one I had somebody with me. It was when I was mining in Colorado, and some fellows I knew had a big cattle ranch down in New Mexico. It was a real ranch--not a two for a cent one like Herrick's. I went down to visit them at round-up time. I'd never seen a round-up before so I was hanging around every chance I got. "They had a lot of cattle--some of them pretty wild--and it wasn't easy to keep 'em together especially at night. Well, one day Jim Masters got a fall from his horse and a kick on the head from another when he was down, and he was in a pretty bad state--it looked to us like concussion of the brain but we didn't know. We carried him into a tent we'd put up about a quarter of a mile from where the cattle were, and one of the boys rode to town for a doctor. "We were up on a mesa, like the one we crossed yesterday, remember? We had outlaw cattle in the bunch and it took all the boys to handle them. I, being a tenderfoot and not much use with the cattle, said I'd sit with Jim and sort of watch him till the doctor came. He was out of his head so 'twasn't any comfort to him but it made the boys feel better." "I'll bet it was a comfort to him, Marc Scott! You are the sort of person it would be a comfort to have around if one was out of one's head," said Polly, emphatically.