“But when Lysander John hears about it he says Angus has just the right stuff in him for a cowman.  He says he has never known one yet that you could tell anything to before he found it out for himself, and Angus must sure have the makings of a good one, so he persuades him to stay round for a while, working at easy jobs that couldn’t stack him up, and later he sent him to Omaha with the bunch in charge of a trainload of steers.

“The trip back was when his romance begun.  Angus had kept fancy-free up to that time, being willing enough but thoroughly cautious.  Do you remember the eating-house at North Platte, Nebraska?  The night train from Omaha would reach there at breakfast time and you’d get out in the frosty air, hungry as a confirmed dyspeptic, and rush into the big red building past the man that was rapidly beating on a gong with one of these soft-ended bass-drum sticks.  My, the good hot smells inside!  Tables already loaded with ham and eggs and fried oysters and fried chicken and sausage and fried potatoes and steaks and hot biscuits and corn bread and hot cakes and regular coffee—­till you didn’t know which to begin on, and first thing you knew you had your plate loaded with too many things—­but how you did eat!—­and yes, thank you, another cup of coffee, and please pass the sirup this way.  And no worry about the train pulling out, because there the conductor is at that other table and it can’t go without him, so take your time—­and about three more of them big fried oysters, the only good fried ones I ever had in the world!  To this day I get hungry thinking of that North Platte breakfast, and mad when I go into the dining-car as we pass there and try to get the languid mulatto to show a little enthusiasm.

“Well, they had girls at that eating-house.  Of course no one ever noticed ’em much, being too famished and busy.  You only knew in a general way that females was passing the food along.  But Angus actually did notice Ellabelle, though it must have been at the end of the meal, mebbe when she was pouring the third cup.  Ellabelle was never right pretty to my notion, but she had some figure and kind of a sad dignity, and her brown hair lacked the towers and minarets and golden domes that the other girls built with their own or theirs by right of purchase.  And she seems to have noticed Angus from the very first.  Angus saw that when she wasn’t passing the fried chicken or the hot biscuits along, even for half a minute, she’d pick up a book from the window sill and glance studiously at its pages.  He saw the book was called ‘Lucile.’  And he looked her over some more—­between mouthfuls, of course—­the neat-fitting black dress revealing every line of her lithe young figure, like these magazine stories say, the starched white apron and the look of sad dignity that had probably come of fresh drummers trying to teach her how to take a joke, and the smooth brown hair—­he’d probably got wise to the other kind back in the social centres of Ohio—­and all at once he saw there was something about her.  He couldn’t tell what it was, but he knew it was there.  He heard one of the over-haired ones call her Ellabelle, and he committed the name to memory.