Connie talked very little that first afternoon.  She watched the people around her, and listened as they discussed the points of the horses, the cowgirls and the jockeys with equal impartiality.  She heard their bets, their guttural grunts of disapproval with the judges’ decisions, their roars of satisfaction when the right horse won.  She watched the cowgirls, walking unconcernedly about the ring, flapping their riding-whips against their leather boots.  She watched the lithe-limbed cowboys slouching not ungracefully around the nervous ponies, waving their hats in greeting to their friends, calling loud jests to their fellows in the cowboy band.  How strange they were, how startlingly human, and yet how thousand-miles removed.

Connie rebelled against it.  They were folks.  And so was Connie.  The thousand miles was a barrier, an injustice.  In order to handle literary material, she must get within touching distance of it.  All those notes she had collected so painstakingly were cold, inanimate.  In order to write of folks she must touch them, feel them, must know they lived and breathed as she did.  Why couldn’t she get at them,—­folks, plain folks, and so was she.  A slow fury rose up in her, and she watched the great events Of the afternoon with resentful eyes.  Even when a man not entered for racing, swung over the railing into the center field, and scrambled upon the bare back of King Devil, the wild horse of the plains which had never yielded to man’s bridling hand, and was tossed and dragged and jerked and twisted, until it seemed there could be no life left in him, yet who finally pulled the horse almost by brute force into submission, while the spectators went wild, and Julia screamed, and Carol sank breathless and white into her seat, and David stood on the bench and yelled until Carol pulled him down,—­even then Connie could not get the feeling.  She wanted to write these people, to put them on paper, and she couldn’t, because they were not people to her, they were just “Good points.”

Afterward, when they slowly made their way to the car, and drove home to the Bijou again, Connie was still silent.  She saw David comfortably settled in the big chair on the sunny corner of the porch, with Carol beside him and Julia romping on the lawn.  Then she walked up and down in front of the hotel.  Finally she came back to the corner of the porch.

“David,” she said impetuously, “I’ve got to speak to one of them myself.”  She waved a hand vaguely in the direction of the fair-grounds.

“One of them?” echoed David.

“Yes, one of those riders.  I want to see if they can make me feel anything.  I want to find out if they are anything like other folks.”

David looked up suddenly, and a smile came to his eyes.  Connie turned quickly, and there, not two feet from her, stood “One of them,” the man who had ridden King Devil.  His sombrero was pushed back on his head, and his hair clung damply to his brown forehead.  His lean face was cynical, sneering.  He carried a whip and spurs in one hand, the other rested on the bulging hip of his khaki riding trousers.