“I never was shy about women. I never could understand why some men who can break a mustang before breakfast and shave in the dark, get all left-handed and full of perspiration and excuses when they see a bold of calico draped around what belongs to it. Inside of eight minutes me and Miss Willella was aggravating the croquet balls around as amiable as second cousins. She gave me a dig about the quantity of canned fruit I had eaten, and I got back at her, flat-footed, about how a certain lady named Eve started the fruit trouble in the first free-grass pasture—‘Over in Palestine, wasn’t it?’ says I, as easy and pat as roping a one-year-old. “That was how I acquired cordiality for the proximities of Miss Willella Learight; and the disposition grew larger as time passed. She was stopping at Pimienta Crossing for her health, which was very good, and for the climate, which was forty per cent. hotter than Palestine. I rode over to see her once every week for a while; and then I figured it out that if I doubled the number of trips I would see her twice as often. “One week I slipped in a third trip; and that’s where the pancakes and the pink-eyed snoozer busted into the game. “That evening, while I set on the counter with a peach and two damsons in my mouth, I asked Uncle Emsley how Miss Willella was. “‘Why,’ says Uncle Emsley, ‘she’s gone riding with Jackson Bird, the sheep man from over at Mired Mule Canada.’ “I swallowed the peach seed and the two damson seeds. I guess somebody held the counter by the bridle while I got off; and then I walked out straight ahead till I butted against the mesquite where my roan was tied. “‘She’s gone riding,’ I whisper in my bronc’s ear, ‘with Birdstone Jack, the hired mule from Sheep Man’s Canada. Did you get that, old Leather-and-Gallops?’ “That bronc of mine wept, in his way. He’d been raised a cow pony and he didn’t care for snoozers. “I went back and said to Uncle Emsley: ‘Did you say a sheep man?’ “‘I said a sheep man,’ says Uncle Emsley again. ‘You must have heard tell of Jackson Bird. He’s got eight sections of grazing and four thousand head of the finest Merinos south of the Arctic Circle.’ “I went out and sat on the ground in the shade of the store and leaned against a prickly pear. I sifted sand into my boots with unthinking hands while I soliloquised a quantity about this bird with the Jackson plumage to his name.