But, beyond a glance from her blue eyes, she took no notice.  The silence was more embarrassing than ever.  He felt that he could give the world just to touch with his lips that hem of her dress where his hand rested.  But he was afraid of frightening her.  He fought to find something to say, licking his parched lips and vainly attempting to articulate something, anything.

“This ain’t Sonoma Valley,” he declared finally.  “This is fairy land, and you’re a fairy.  Mebbe I’m asleep and dreaming.  I don’t know.  You and me don’t know how to talk together, because, you see, you’re a fairy and don’t know nothing but good things, and I’m a man from the bad, wicked world.”

Having achieved this much, he was left gasping for ideas like a stranded fish.

“And you’re going to tell me about the bad, wicked world,” she cried, clapping her hands.  “I’m just dying to know.”

He looked at her, startled, remembering the wreckage of womanhood he had encountered on the sunken ways of life.  She was no fairy.  She was flesh and blood, and the possibilities of wreckage were in her as they had been in him even when he lay at his mother’s breast.  And there was in her eagerness to know.

“Nope,” he said lightly, “this man from the bad, wicked world ain’t going to tell you nothing of the kind.  He’s going to tell you of the good things in that world.  He’s going to tell you how he loved hosses when he was a shaver, and about the first hoss he straddled, and the first hoss he owned.  Hosses ain’t like men.  They’re better.  They’re clean—­clean all the way through and back again.  And, little fairy, I want to tell you one thing—­there sure ain’t nothing in the world like when you’re settin’ a tired hoss at the end of a long day, and when you just speak, and that tired animal lifts under you willing and hustles along.  Hosses!  They’re my long suit.  I sure dote on hosses.  Yep.  I used to be a cowboy once.”

She clapped her hands in the way that tore so delightfully to his heart, and her eyes were dancing, as she exclaimed: 

“A Texas cowboy!  I always wanted to see one!  I heard papa say once that cowboys are bow-legged.  Are you?”

“I sure was a Texas cowboy,” he answered.  “But it was a long time ago.  And I’m sure bow-legged.  You see, you can’t ride much when you’re young and soft without getting the legs bent some.  Why, I was only a three-year-old when I begun.  He was a three-year-old, too, fresh-broken.  I led him up alongside the fence, dumb to the top rail, and dropped on.  He was a pinto, and a real devil at bucking, but I could do anything with him.  I reckon he knowed I was only a little shaver.  Some hosses knows lots more ‘n’ you think.”

For half an hour Ross Shanklin rambled on with his horse reminiscences, never unconscious for a moment of the supreme joy that was his through the touch of his hand on the hem of her dress.  The sun dropped slowly into the cloud bank, the quail called more insistently, and empty wagon after empty wagon rumbled back across the bridge.  Then came a woman’s voice.