“How about the teacher, Pete?” he asked, quietly, innocently.  “They have a real fine teacher, I suppose?  Man or—­woman?”

“Nuther!  She’s a lady!  An’ she’s that smart as would make a man wonder!  In case there’s anything as that same Miss Jocelyn Truxton don’t know, I ain’t wise to it none.”

“And—­pretty?”

Lonesome Pete’s joyous grin was like a beam of summer sunlight.

“They ain’t none han’somer as ever wasted her time ridin’ herd on a bunch of dirty-faced brats.  Say, Con,” a bit doubtfully, “I wouldn’t mind showin’ you—­you ain’t goin’ to blow it off to the boys, are you?”

Conniston swore himself to secrecy and watched Lonesome Pete with twinkling eyes as the cowboy put his hand deep into the inside pocket of his vest—­the left pocket.  First he removed the safety-pin with which the top edges of the pocket were held securely together.  Then he brought out a bit of cardboard wrapped carefully in a wonderfully clean red handkerchief.  Whipping the handkerchief from the cardboard, he held out to Conniston’s gaze the picture it concealed.

“That’s her, Con.  An’ I’ll leave it to you if she ain’t in the blue-ribbon class, huh?”

She was pretty, decidedly pretty.  Very dark, evidently young, her face rounded, her mouth laughing, her eyes soft and big.  And withal it was a doll-like prettiness, a prettiness which was a trifle too conscious of itself; there was a bit too much pose, too much studied effect.  Conniston thought that the girl’s two chief characteristics were so close under the smiling surface that he could not help seeing them, and that they were, first, vanity; second, weakness.

“So that’s Jocelyn Truxton, is it?” He handed the picture back to Lonesome Pete, who, with a long, worshipful glance at it, restored it in its wrapping to his vest pocket.  “Not the daughter of Bat Truxton?”

“You wouldn’t think it to look at her after seein’ him, would you?”

Never having seen either of them, Conniston remained non-committal.

“Mrs. Bat Truxton was a Boston, Mass., girl, an’ I reckon as how Miss Jocelyn takes after her.”

So there had sprung up between the two men a strange sort of friendship, a strange sort of intimacy.  For even when he came to have a strong liking for Lonesome Pete, Conniston could never for a second look upon this illiterate, uncouth cowboy as an equal, could not refrain from feeling toward him an amused and tolerant contempt.  If palmy days ever came again, he was used to thinking, he would find a place for the red-headed man in his retinue of hired men.  He could have an easy job at a good salary gardening about the Adirondack country home, or perhaps he might grow into a fair chauffeur.

Gradually Conniston had learned how to ride the wild devils they called broken saddle-horses as a cowman should, and without pulling leather.  With Lonesome Pete a patient tutor, he was even beginning to learn how to throw a rope without entangling his own person and his own horse in it, and how to make it obey him and drop over the horns of a running steer.  These things came slowly and with many discouraging failures.  But they served as a stimulant and an encouragement to the man who taught him and whom he taught.