anxious to make his acquaintance; for when a cow-puncher has his pay many people will take an interest in him.  The three gamblers did not know that Mr. McLean could play cards.  He left them late in the evening fat with their money, and sought the tepees of the Arapahoes.  They lived across the road from the Shoshones, and among their tents the boy remained until morning.  He was here in church now, keeping his promise to see the bishop with the girl of yesterday; and while he gravely looked at the bishop, Miss Sabina Stone allowed his arm to encircle her waist.  No soldier had achieved this yet, but Lin was the first cow-puncher she had seen, and he had given her the handkerchief from round his neck.

The quiet air blew in through the windows and door, the pure, light breath from the mountains; only, passing over their foot-hills it had caught and carried the clear aroma of the sage-brush.  This it brought into church, and with this seemed also to float the peace and great silence of the plains.  The little melodeon in the corner, played by one of the ladies at the post, had finished accompanying the hymn, and now it prolonged a few closing chords while the bishop paused before his address, resting his keen eyes on the people.  He was dressed in a plain suit of black with a narrow black tie.  This was because the Union Pacific Railroad, while it had delivered him correctly at Green River, had despatched his robes towards Cheyenne.

Without citing chapter and verse the bishop began: 

“And he arose, and came to his father.  But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck and kissed him.”

The bishop told the story of that surpassing parable, and then proceeded to draw from it a discourse fitted to the drifting destinies in whose presence he found himself for one solitary morning.  He spoke unlike many clergymen.  His words were chiefly those which the people round him used, and his voice was more like earnest talking than preaching.

Miss Sabina Stone felt the arm of her cow-puncher loosen slightly, and she looked at him.  But he was looking at the bishop, no longer gravely but with wide-open eyes, alert.  When the narrative reached the elder brother in the field, and how he came to the house and heard sounds of music and dancing, Miss Stone drew away from her companion and let him watch the bishop, since he seemed to prefer that.  She took to reading hymns vindictively.  The bishop himself noted the sun-browned boy face and the wide-open eyes.  He was too far away to see anything but the alert, listening position of the young cow-puncher.  He could not discern how that, after he had left the music and dancing and begun to draw morals, attention faded from those eyes that seemed to watch him, and they filled with dreaminess.  It was very hot in church.  Chief Washakie went to sleep, and so did a corporal; but Lin McLean sat in the same alert position till Miss Stone pulled him and asked if he intended to sit down through the hymn.  Then church was out.  Officers, Indians, and all the people dispersed through the great sunshine to their dwellings, and the cow-puncher rode beside Sabina in silence.