The girl listened amazed.  She knew certain stars as landmarks, telling east from west and north from south; and she had often watched them one by one coming out, and counted them her friends; but that they were worlds, and that the inhabitants of this earth knew anything whatever about the heavenly bodies, she had never heard.  Question after question she plied him with, some of them showing extraordinary intelligence and thought, and others showing deeper ignorance than a little child in our kindergartens would show.

He wondered more and more as their talk went on.  He grew deeply interested in unfolding the wonders of the heavens to her; and, as he studied her pure profile in the moonlight with eager, searching, wistful gaze, her beauty impressed him more and more.  In the East the man had a friend, an artist.  He thought how wonderful a theme for a painting this scene would make.  The girl in picturesque hat of soft felt, riding with careless ease and grace; horse, maiden, plain, bathed in a sea of silver.

More and more as she talked the man wondered how this girl reared in the wilds had acquired a speech so free from grammatical errors.  She was apparently deeply ignorant, and yet with a very few exceptions she made no serious errors in English.  How was it to be accounted for?

He began to ply her with questions about herself, but could not find that she had ever come into contact with people who were educated.  She had not even lived in any of the miserable little towns that flourish in the wildest of the West, and not within several hundred miles of a city.  Their nearest neighbors in one direction had been forty miles away, she said, and said it as if that were an everyday distance for a neighbor to live.

Mail?  They had had a letter once that she could remember, when she was a little girl.  It was just a few lines in pencil to say that her mother’s father had died.  He had been killed in an accident of some sort, working in the city where he lived.  Her mother had kept the letter and cried over it till almost all the pencil marks were gone.

No, they had no mail on the mountain where their homestead was.

Yes, her father went there first because he thought he had discovered gold, but it turned out to be a mistake; so, as they had no other place to go to, and no money to go with, they had just stayed there; and her father and brothers had been cow-punchers, but she and her mother had scarcely ever gone away from home.  There were the little children to care for; and, when they died, her mother did not care to go, and would not let her go far alone.

O, yes, she had ridden a great deal, sometimes with her brothers, but not often.  They went with rough men, and her mother felt afraid to have her go.  The men all drank.  Her brothers drank.  Her father drank too.  She stated it as if it were a sad fact common to all mankind, and ended with the statement which was almost, not quite, a question, “I guess you drink too.”