“I should say _not_!” said Dr. Gurney Mayfield with immense heartiness. The easterner slipped a hand under Snort’s mane and the roan, trembling a little, let him rub his neck slowly and steadily. The young man took time, at last, to look about him. They were on the shoulder of a brown and rugged mountain, looking forward to range on range of other mountains, brown, gray, blue, purple in distance, piling up against the warm sky, looking back to the shining sea three thousand feet below them, with a crimson sun sinking swiftly on the edge of the world. With his hand on Snort’s arched neck it was a moment of highly colored happiness such as he had not known for eleven months--since he had taken his eye away from the kaleidoscope at Dos Pozos. “This is--tremendous, Doctor!” He gave a long sigh of utter satisfaction. “There aren’t any words for it.” Then he turned his attention to the doctor’s mount. “I’ve been so engrossed in my horse I haven’t noticed yours, Doctor. Splendid, isn’t he?” “Well, now, I was beginning to wonder when you’d get round to old Ted,” said Dr. Mayfield. “He’s used to compliments, Ted is. Wouldn’t sell him for his weight in sapphires!” The horse, a tall and powerful creature, turned his head and listened to his master with delicately twitching ears. “See those ears? Many’s the time Ted’s pointed a deer for me, before I saw it. He’s a gentleman; he’s a man and a brother; you can count on him in a tight place. I’ll have to tell you how he saved my life once. It was--but I guess we’ll have to be jogging along to supper, right now.” The young man, however, stood still, looking at him with an enhanced color in his keen and eager face. “If you’ve a moment more to spare, Doctor, I--I should like to make myself clear to you on the subject of--Ginger; of my attitude toward Ginger.” The older man saw that this, too, was immediate. Just as he had had to justify himself in the saddle, so now he must clear his mind of a studied explanation. He wanted his supper but he said comfortably, “Of course, Dean.” He began with entire composure. “You know the shape I was in last year, body and mind. I was a miserable weakling, a supersensitive, hysterical idiot, and my sense of humor, which I had always considered as much a part of me as an arm or a leg, seemed to have been amputated. We--Ginger and I--were utter strangers; not strangers as a Boston girl and myself would have been, or Ginger and a western man, but--aliens. We had lived in different worlds; we spoke different tongues.” His friend nodded, understandingly. “That’s a fact, Dean. That’s a fact.” He could see that the young man was not only telling him--he was telling himself; urging himself to be convinced.