"Sure I do," she answered. "College courses, and all that kind of thing; they're good stuff, all right, but they make some awful nice boys--real live boys, you know--into some awful dead ones. Either they get the highbrow, and become bores, or the swelled head, and become cads. Not all, you know, but lots of them. And then when they get out they have to start learning the real things of life--things that you have been learning here for ever so long. My father says about the best education is to learn to live within your income, pay your debts, and give the other fellow a chance to do the same. They don't all learn that in college. So when they get out they have to go and work for somebody who has learned it, like you have. Then there's the things you do, just like you were born to it, that they couldn't do to save their lives. Why, I've seen you smash six bottles at a stretch, you going full gallop, and whooping and shooting so we could hardly tell which was which. And ride--you could make more money riding for city people to look at than most of those learned fellows, with letters after their names like the tail of a kite, will ever see. But I wouldn't like you to make it that way. There's more useful things to do." He was comforted by this speech, but he referred to his accomplishments modestly. "Ridin' an' shootin' ain't nothin'," he said. "I'm not so sure," she answered. "Father says the day is coming when our country will want men who can shoot and ride more than it will want lawyers or professors." "Well, when it does, it can call on me," he said, and there was the pride in his voice which comes to a boy who feels that in some way he can take a man's place in the world. "Them is two things I sure can do." Years later she was to think of her remark and his answer, consecrated then in clean red blood. They talked of many things that afternoon, and when at last the lengthening shadows warned them it was time to be on the way they rode long distances in silence. Both felt a sense which neither ventured to express, that they had travelled very close in the world of their hopes and sorrows and desires. Perhaps, as they rode along the foothill trail, they were still journeying together down the long, strange trails of the future; dim, visionary, exquisite trails; rough, hard, cruel trails hidden in the merciful mirage of their young hopefulness.