Lolling in the shade of his horse or sitting with his back to the dry wind, Bowles watched them "pluck the blossoms" while he doctored his numerous wounds, meanwhile falling into lovelorn reveries on the subject of Dixie Lee. It was humiliating, in a way, to be reduced to the ranks; to be compelled to wait on her pleasure, and court her from afar; but something told him that Dixie thought of him even though she passed him by; and just to be one of her lovers, to be allowed to worship with the rest--that was enough to bear him up and give him courage to wait. And either in the end she would speak to him and take him back into her life, or he would depart in silence to hide from her laughing eyes. The game of love was new to Bowles and he knew little of its stealth and wiles; just to be near her was all he knew, and the future must solve the rest. So, like a questing knight, nursing his hurts after his first combat, he sat out on the boundless prairie and communed with his own sad heart. Across the herd from him a battered old-time cowboy sat, crooked-legged, on his horse. On the day before a bronk had thrown him by treachery and kicked him as he dragged--even turned around and jumped on him and stamped him in the face. A great bruise, red and raw, ran up from his brows to his bald-spot where the iron shoe had struck; but still the old-timer was content. "A cowboy don't need no haid above his eyebrows, nohow," he had said. "Jest think if he had hit me on the jaw!" Yes, indeed, but what if he had hit him in the temple or trampled him to death! Or suppose, just for instance, that Mr. Bowles, of New York, had been on the bronk instead of Uncle Joe, the veteran--would he have had sense enough to get his foot out of the stirrup? That was the trouble with standing day-herd--it gave the imagination a chance to work. Bowles looked out over the plain again and noticed every little thing--the rattleweed, planted so regularly on the sandy flat; the dogholes, each with its high-topped mound to keep out the rain and floods; the black line of mesquite brush against the distant hills; the band of yuccas along their flanks; and then the soft, moulded summits, now green, now yellow, now creamy white as shrubs and bushes and bunch grass caught the light. It was very beautiful, but lonely. Yes, it lacked color--a vigorous girlish figure in the foreground to give it the last poetic touch.