"And that is nonsense. A man does a man's work, honorable work with his two hands, and makes his own money, much or little. The most independent men in the world, Mr. Conniston, are men like Brayley and Toothy and Rawhide Jones and the rest. Are you not as good a man as these, as independent, as free to do as you like, as they are?" "Am I as good a man!" He laughed shortly. "Conceit, no doubt, Miss Crawford, but none the less I really do fancy that a Conniston is as good as the sort of men I have been herding with here of late!" She seemed not to notice his sarcasm, although his tones rang with it. "Your going to work for father--I think it was brave of you. If it makes any difference at all it will be because you make it do so. I should be glad to have you ride with me as a companion if you wish." She pricked her horse with her spur and rode on. And Conniston, after a brief moment of hesitation in which he began to see that he had been acting rather foolishly, galloped up to her side. "I am afraid I have been boorish, Miss Crawford. You must forgive me." "In three weeks you have learned a great deal, but there is still a great deal which you do not seem to have assimilated." "I have learned--" There was a question in his unfinished sentence. "You have learned to ride as a man must who is to do his day's work of twelve, maybe fifteen, hours in the saddle. Surely that is something. You have learned to rope a steer on the dead run. You have learned to rope your own horse, to throw him while you saddle him, and to ride him when he gets up. You have learned to work." He stared at her in surprise. "How do you know what I have been doing?" She laughed, a happy gurgle of a laugh which made a man want to laugh with her without knowing the cause of her merriment. "Lonesome Pete has brought me news, and Toothy, and even your friend Brayley! Do you know," mischief lurking in the depths of her eyes above the assumed gravity of her face, "I think that the boys are actually beginning to approve of you." "Flattering, I must say!" "I think that it is." "Even," he cried, incredulously, wondering if she could jest so earnestly--"even by such men as Toothy and Rawhide Jones and the rest?" She looked at him steadily, frowning a little bit. "I don't know why you should speak of them so contemptuously. If, on the one hand, they have had no great social advantages, on the other hand have they not at least made men out of themselves?" "I had hardly looked upon them in that light," he answered, with something of the sneer still in his voice. "I had looked upon them rather as I had supposed you were ready to consider me, as machines of the type which ladies and gentlemen have to wait upon them, to do the unskilled labor for them, as common laborers."