“Flattering, I must say!”

“I think that it is.”

“Even,” he cried, incredulously, wondering if she could jest so earnestly—­“even by such men as Toothy and Rawhide Jones and the rest?”

She looked at him steadily, frowning a little bit.

“I don’t know why you should speak of them so contemptuously.  If, on the one hand, they have had no great social advantages, on the other hand have they not at least made men out of themselves?”

“I had hardly looked upon them in that light,” he answered, with something of the sneer still in his voice.  “I had looked upon them rather as I had supposed you were ready to consider me, as machines of the type which ladies and gentlemen have to wait upon them, to do the unskilled labor for them, as common laborers.”

“Common laborers!  I hate that word.  They are men, aren’t they?  They are stanch friends and good enemies.  They are true to their own laws and to their conceptions of right and wrong.  And they are strong and self-reliant and free and independent.”

“And still they are ignorant, unrefined, coarse.  Not your equals, Miss Crawford, and, I thank God, not mine!”

“Not yours?  Are you sure?”

“You are serious—­or are you making fun of me?”

“I am very serious.”  There was no mistaking that when he looked into her eyes.

“They are the sons of Smith and Jones and Brown,” he replied slowly.  “Smith and Jones and Brown before them were uneducated, ignorant, living lives with low horizons, seeing nothing, knowing nothing of the greater world beyond their ken.  They were a degree higher than the horses which they mastered, the cattle which they drove to market.  And now their sons, inheriting the limited natures of their sires, have grown like weeds in the environment in which fate put them, with no knowledge of the other things.  I think that it is answer enough when I say that I am the son of William Conniston.”

He did not mean to boast.  He merely stated a simple fact simply.  And the scorn leaping up in her eyes, ringing in her clear voice as she answered him, startled him.

“We know a man by his hands, not by his name!” she cried, her face flushing with her eagerness.  “Our admiration, our respect is always for the man who does things, not for the man whose father did them for him.  And now, because men like Lonesome Pete and Brayley and the rest of the boys live a life which knows nothing of your world, you sneer at them!”

“I’ll admit,” he granted, although stung by her hot words, “that the poor devils have hardly had a fair chance.  They are handicapped—­”

“Handicapped!” Her scorn was a fine thing, leaping out at him, cutting into his words.  “Can’t you see who it is that is handicapped in the great race here—­here in the West?  Here where there is a fight going on every day, every night of the year, a battle royal of man against mother earth?  And the man who fights here successfully a winning fight, not stopping to ask at what odds, must be endowed with a great strength, a rugged physical and moral constitution, self-reliance, a true, deep insight into the natures of other men.  Those things my father has.  So has Bat Truxton, so has Brayley, so, for that matter, has Lonesome Pete.”