Being a darn-fool kid, I let it go at that, and wrote to her once in a while and got busy learning to punch cattle. Lord love you, I didn’t have much to learn, because I was raised in the saddle. There were none of them better than me if I did have a High-School education. My eyes had gone bad along back while I was in the High-school, calling for spectacles. When I first rode in gig-lamps, they used to josh me, but when I got good with the rope and shot off-hand with the best and took first prize for busting broncos Fourth of July at Range City, they called me the “Four-eyed Cow-puncher,” and I was real proud of it. I wish it was all the nickname I ever had. “The Hero of Pago Bridge”—I wish to God—— The XQX is seventy miles down the river from Striped Rock. Seventy miles ain’t such a distance in Colorado, only I never went back for pretty near two years and a half. Then, one Christmas when we were riding fences—keeping the line up against the snow, and running the cattle back if they broke the wires and got across—I got to thinking of the holiday dances at Striped Rock, and says I: “Here’s for a Christmas as near home as I can get, and a sight of Susie.” The boss let me off, and I made it in on Christmas Eve. The dance was going on down at Foresters’ Hall. I fixed up and took it in. And there she was—I didn’t know her for the start she’d got. Her hair—that she used to wear in two molassesy-coloured braids hanging down her back, and shining in the sun the way candy shines when you pull it—was done up all over her head. She was all pinky and whitey in the face the way she used to be when she was a little girl. She had on a sort of pink dress, mighty pretty, with green wassets down the front and a green dingbat around the bottom, and long—not the way it was when I saw her before. She was rushed to the corner with every geezer in the place piled in front of her. I broke into the bunch. Everybody seemed to see me except Susie. She treated me like any other maverick in the herd. She hadn’t even a dance left for me. Once, in “Old Dan Tucker,” she called me out, but she’d called out every other tarantula in the White River country, so there was no hope in that. If ever a man didn’t know where he was at, I was the candidate. All that winter, riding the fence, I thought and thought. I’d been so dead sure of her that I was letting her go. Here was the principal of the High-school, and young Mullins that worked in the Rancher’s Bank, and Biles that owned stock in the P L, all after her, like broncos after a marked steer, and I was only the “Four-eyed Cow-puncher,” thirty dollars and found. And I got bluer than the light on the snow. And then says I to myself, if she ain’t married when spring melts, by the Lord, I’ll have her.