CHAPTER II.

On the divide.

Had the man on the Divide noticed the approaching horseman it would have been evident, even to one so unacquainted with the country as the stranger, that the rider belonged to that land of riders.  While still at a distance too great for the eye to distinguish the details of fringed leather chaps, soft shirt, short jumper, sombrero, spurs and riata, no one could have mistaken the ease and grace of the cowboy who seemed so literally a part of his horse.  His seat in the saddle was so secure, so easy, and his bearing so unaffected and natural, that every movement of the powerful animal he rode expressed itself rhythmically in his own lithe and sinewy body.

While the stranger sat wrapped in meditative thought, unheeding the approach of the rider, the horseman, coming on with a long, swinging lope, watched the motionless figure on the summit of the Divide with careful interest.  As he drew nearer the cowboy pulled his horse down to a walk, and from under his broad hat brim regarded the stranger intently.  He was within a few yards of the point where the man sat when the latter caught the sound of the horse’s feet, and, with a quick, startled look over his shoulder, sprang up and started as if to escape.  But it was too late, and, as though on second thought, he whirled about with a half defiant air to face the intruder.

The horseman stopped.  He had not missed the significance of that hurried movement, and his right hand rested carelessly on his leather clad thigh, while his grey eyes were fixed boldly, inquiringly, almost challengingly, on the man he had so unintentionally surprised.

As he sat there on his horse, so alert, so ready, in his cowboy garb and trappings, against the background of Granite Mountain, with all its rugged, primeval strength, the rider made a striking picture of virile manhood.  Of some years less than thirty, he was, perhaps, neither as tall nor as heavy as the stranger; but in spite of a certain boyish look on his smooth-shaven, deeply-bronzed face, he bore himself with the unmistakable air of a matured and self-reliant man.  Every nerve and fiber of him seemed alive with that vital energy which is the true beauty and the glory of life.

The two men presented a striking contrast.  Without question one was the proud and finished product of our most advanced civilization.  It was as evident that the splendid manhood of the other had never been dwarfed by the weakening atmosphere of an over-cultured, too conventional and too complex environment.  The stranger with his carefully tailored clothing and his man-of-the-world face and bearing was as unlike this rider of the unfenced lands as a daintily groomed thoroughbred from the sheltered and guarded stables of fashion is unlike a wild, untamed stallion from the hills and ranges about Granite Mountain.  Yet, unlike as they were, there was a something that marked them as kin.  The man of the ranges and the man of the cities were, deep beneath the surface of their beings, as like as the spirited thoroughbred and the unbroken wild horse.  The cowboy was all that the stranger might have been.  The stranger was all that the cowboy, under like conditions, would have been.