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She accused herself of callousness but the spring of her sympathy, usually so ready, seemed dry as dust when she would have wasted a few drops on Slade. The next day, in the late afternoon, Harris looked up and saw a chap-clad rider on the edge of the valley. She had ridden over unannounced on a horse she had borrowed from Brill. She answered the wave of his hat and urged the horse down the slope.
The mule teams were plowing in the flats. A line of chap-clad men roosted as so many crows on the top bar of the corral, mildly interested in the performance of another who twirled a rope in a series of amazing tricks. "That's what I need; all that," she said. "And you're asking me to give it up." "But it's not the life for a girl," he insisted.
He offered them eagerly to the chap-clad youth on his right. "Take one, won't you? An' pass the others round." The name of the cowboy was Hawks. He looked at the cigars with disfavor. "I reckon I'll not be carin' for a cigar to-night, thank you," he said slowly. "Perhaps the others if you'll pass them." Hawks handed the cigars to a brick-red Hercules patching his overalls.
Chap-clad punchers galloped through the streets at all hours of the day and night letting out their joyous "Eee-yip-eee." The keys of Tolleson's and half a dozen other gambling places had long since been lost, for the doors were never closed to patrons. At games of chance the roof was the limit, in the expressive phrase of the country. Guns cracked at the slightest difference of opinion.
One after another these lean, brown men, chap-clad and bow-legged, came forward dragging their saddles and clamped themselves to the backs of hurricane outlaws which pitched, bucked, crashed into fences, and toppled over backward in their frenzied efforts to dislodge the human clothes-pins fastened to them. The bronco busters endured the usual luck of the day.
Already she loved her West and its picturesque, chap-clad population. Their jingling spurs and their colored kerchiefs knotted round sunburned necks, their frank, whole-hearted abandon to the interest of the moment, led her to regard these youths as schoolboys.
The girl sauntered in and glanced carelessly about her. Two or three chap-clad cowboys were lounging against the counter watching another buy a suit of clothes. The wide-brimmed hats of all of them came off instantly at sight of her. The frontier was rampantly lawless, but nowhere in the world did a good woman meet with more unquestioning respect.
Is it yore notion we'd oughta sit around with our hands in our pockets, Blister, while reptiles like this Houck make our girls swim the river at night an' plough barefoot through snowstorms? I ain't that easy-dispositioned myself." "Shorty's sure whistlin'. Same here," another chap-clad rider chipped in. "An' here." Blister dropped into the background inconspicuously and vanished.
Deane moved across to the Three Bar girl. There was a general rush for the side opposite the bar where the ladies had gathered. Couples squared off for the Virginia reel, the shortage of ladies rectified by a handkerchief tied on the arm of many a chap-clad youth to signify that he was, for the moment, a girl.
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