When she came across the fields late in the afternoon, the strange youth’s horse was picketed where the bunch-grass grew high, and the young man himself talked with her father by the corral bars. She had never realised how old her father was, how weak, and small, and bent, until she saw him beside this erect young fellow. Her heart went out to the older man with a new sympathy as she saw his feebleness so sharply in relief against the well-blooded, hard-muscled vigour of the younger. When she would have passed them, her father called to her. “Prudence, this is Mr. Ruel Follett. He will stay with us to-night.” The sombrero was off again and she felt the blue eyes seeking hers, though she could not look up from the ground when she had given her little bow. She heard him say: “I already met your daughter, sir, at the mouth of the cañon.” She went on toward the house, hearing them resume their talk, the stranger saying, “That horse can sure carry all the weight you want to put on him and step away good; he’ll do it right at both ends, too—Dandy will—and he’s got a mighty tasty lope.” Later she brought him a towel when he had washed himself in the tin basin on the bench outside the house. He had doffed the “chapps” and hung them on a peg, the scarlet kerchief was also off, his shirt was open at the neck, and soap and water had played freely over his head. He took the towel from her with a sputtering, “Thank you,” and with a pair of muscular, brown hands proceeded to scour himself dry until the yellow hair stood about him as a halo—without, however, in the least suggesting the angelic or even saintly: for his face, from the friction inflamed to a high degree, was now a mass of red with two inquiring spots of blue near the upper edge. But then the clean mouth opened in its frank smile, and her own dark lashes had to fall upon her cheeks until she turned away. At supper and afterwards Mr. Follett talked freely of himself, or seemed to. He was from the high plains and the short-grass country, wherever that might be—to the east and south she gathered. He had grown up in that country, working for his father, who had been an overland freighter, until the day the railroad tracks were joined at Promontory. He, himself, had watched the gold and silver spikes driven into the tie of California mahogany two years before; and then, though they still kept a few wagon trains moving to the mining camps north and south of the railroad, they had looked for other occupations.