Standing beside Endicott upon the edge of the crowd Alice Marcum had enjoyed herself hugely. The little wooden town with its high fenced cattle corrals, and its row of one story buildings that faced the alkali flat had interested her from the first, and she had joined with hearty goodwill in the rounds of applause that at frequent intervals had interrupted the speech of the little town's Mayor. A born horsewoman, she had watched with breathless admiration the onrush of the loose-rein riders--the graceful swaying of their bodies, and the flapping of soft hat brims, as their horses approached with a thunder of pounding hoofs. Her eyes had sparkled at the reckless swerving of the horses when it seemed that the next moment the back-surging crowd would be trampled into the ground. She had wondered at the precision with which the Texan's loop fell; and had joined heartily in the laughter that greeted the ludicrous and red-faced indignation with which a fat woman had crawled from beneath a coach whither she had sought refuge from the onrush of thundering hoofs. In the mind of the girl, cowboys had always been associated with motion picture theatres, where concourses of circus riders in impossible regalia performed impossible feats of horsemanship in the unravelling of impossible plots. She had never thought of them as real--or, if she had, it was as a vanished race, like the Aztec and the buffalo. But here were real cowboys in the flesh: Open-throated, bronzed man, free and unrestrained as the air they breathed--men whose very appearance called to mind boundless open spaces, purple sage, blue mountains, and herds of bellowing cattle. Here were men bound by no petty and meaningless conventions--men the very sight of whom served to stimulate and intensify the longing to see for herself the land beyond the valley rims--to slip into a saddle and ride, and ride, and ride--to feel the beat of the rain against her face, and the whip of the wind, and the burning rays of the sun, and at night to lie under the winking stars and listen to the howl of the coyotes.