David shook hands with him cordially, with smiling eyes, and asked him to sit down so Connie might ask her questions in comfort.  They all took chairs, and Prince waited.  Connie racked her brain.  Five minutes ago there had been ten thousand things she yearned to know about this strange existence.  Now, unfairly, she could not think of one.  It seemed to her she knew all there was to know about them.  They looked into each other’s eyes, men and women, as men and women do in Chicago.  They touched hands, and the blood quickened, the old Chicago style.  They talked plain English, they liked pretty clothes, they worshiped good horses, they lived on the boundless plains.  What on earth was there to ask?  Quite suddenly, Connie understood them perfectly.

But Prince realized that he was not making good.  His one claim to admission in her presence was his ability to tell her what she wanted to know.  He had got to tell her things,—­but what things?  My stars, what did she want to know?  How old he was, where he was born, if he was married,—­oh, by George, she didn’t think he was married, did she?

“I am not married,” he said abruptly.  David looked around at him in surprise, and Carol’s eyes opened widely.  But Connie, with what must have been literary intuition, understood.  She nodded at him and smiled as she asked, “Have you always lived out here?”

“No.”  He straightened his shoulders and drew a deep breath.  Here was a starter, it would be his own fault if he could not keep talking the rest of the night.  “No, I came out from Columbus when I was eighteen.  Came for my health.”  He squared his shoulders again, and laughed a big deep laugh which made Connie marvel that there should be such big deep laughs in the world.

“My father was a doctor.  He sent me out, and I got a job punching time in the mines at Cripple Creek.  I met some stock men, and one of them offered me a job, and I came out and got in with them.  Then I got hold of a bit of land and began gathering up stock for myself.  I stayed with the Sparker outfit six years, and then my father died.  I took the money and got my start, and—­why, that is all.”  He stopped in astonishment.  He had been sure his story would last several hours.  He had begun at the very start, his illness at eighteen, and here he was right up to the present, and—­he rubbed his knee despairingly.  There must be something else.  There had to be something else.  What under the sun had he been doing all these fourteen years in the ranges?

“Don’t you ever wish to go back?” Connie prompted kindly.

“Back to Columbus?  I went twice to see my father.  He had a private sanatorium.  My booming voice gave his nervous patients prostrations, and father thought my clothes were not sanitary because they could not be sterilized.  Are you going to stay here for good?”

It was very risky to ask, he knew, but he had to find out.