Stewart was a combination of fire, strength, and action.  These attributes seemed to cling about him.  There was something vital and compelling in his presence.  Worn and spent and drawn as he was from the long ride, he thrilled Madeline with his potential youth and unused vitality and promise of things to be, red-blooded deeds, both of flesh and spirit.  In him she saw the strength of his forefathers unimpaired.  The life in him was marvelously significant.  The dust, the dirt, the sweat, the soiled clothes, the bruised and bandaged hand, the brawn and bone—­these had not been despised by the knights of ancient days, nor by modern women whose eyes shed soft light upon coarse and bloody toilers.

Madeline Hammond compared the man of the East with the man of the West; and that comparison was the last parting regret for her old standards.

XVII The Lost Mine of the Padres

In the cool, starry evenings the campers sat around a blazing fire and told and listened to stories thrillingly fitted to the dark crags and the wild solitude.

Monty Price had come to shine brilliantly as a storyteller.  He was an atrocious liar, but this fact would not have been evident to his enthralled listeners if his cowboy comrades, in base jealousy, had not betrayed him.  The truth about his remarkable fabrications, however, had not become known to Castleton, solely because of the Englishman’s obtuseness.  And there was another thing much stranger than this and quite as amusing.  Dorothy Coombs knew Monty was a liar; but she was so fascinated by the glittering, basilisk eyes he riveted upon her, so taken in by his horrible tales of blood, that despite her knowledge she could not help believing them.

Manifestly Monty was very proud of his suddenly acquired gift.  Formerly he had hardly been known to open his lips in the presence of strangers.  Monty had developed more than one singular and hitherto unknown trait since his supremacy at golf had revealed his possibilities.  He was as sober and vain and pompous about his capacity for lying as about anything else.  Some of the cowboys were jealous of him because he held the attention and, apparently, the admiration of the ladies; and Nels was jealous, not because Monty made himself out to be a wonderful gun-man, but because Monty could tell a story.  Nels really had been the hero of a hundred fights; he had never been known to talk about them; but Dorothy’s eyes and Helen’s smile had somehow upset his modesty.  Whenever Monty would begin to talk Nels would growl and knock his pipe on a log, and make it appear he could not stay and listen, though he never really left the charmed circle of the camp-fire.  Wild horses could not have dragged him away.

One evening at twilight, as Madeline was leaving her tent, she encountered Monty.  Evidently, he had way-laid her.  With the most mysterious of signs and whispers he led her a little aside.