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Our Western-born youth of twenty-five had the wants and the sense of power inherited from a line of men eager of initiative, the product of an environment where only such could survive.
"The good old greasewood hills!" chanted Gantry, who was of those who curse their homeland to its face and praise it consistently and pugnaciously elsewhere. "Are you ever coming back to them, Blount? I believe you told me once, in the old college days, that you were Western-born."
Moreover, it was subtly suggestive. "Ever meet your father's er the present Mrs. Blount, Evan?" he asked. "No." Blount may have been Western-born, but the chilling discouragement he could crowd into the two-letter negation spoke eloquently of his Eastern training. Gantry was rebuffed but not disheartened. "She is a mighty fine woman," he ventured. "So I have been given to understand."
She was Western-born, I a New-Englander; and every trait about her, from the freedom with which she hurled out her opinions to the very setting-down of her broad foot, jarred on me as a something boorish and reckless. Her face grew red now. "I don't say what I want exactly," she hesitated.
Invariably maintaining a certain reserve, yet hospitable and generous towards strangers, and ready to give help without question where needed, the western-born man and woman carries a dignity and presence easily recognised, and a friend who visited the west after many years, remarks: "I say, you have a grand stamp of man and woman growing up in the west, but you are not giving them encouragement to live in and develop their country as you should do."
He had been married before; there were five children, beginning at Robert, the young preacher at Newport, and ending with Teddy, beating the drum with his fists yonder on the table; all of them, like their father, Western-born, with big, square-built frames, and grave, downright-looking faces; simple-hearted, and much given, the whole party, to bursts of hearty laughter, and a habit of perpetually joking with each other.
At the end of long journeys with caravans, after years of residence with the Bedawin, the Western-born, wherever they may be, will stop and wait the passing of the stately brute. The charm is not in the figure, which not even love can make beautiful; nor in the movement, the noiseless stepping, or the broad careen. As is the kindness of the sea to a ship, so that of the desert to its creature.
"Oh, of course, if you put it on that ground," said the railroad traffic manager. "Just the same, there's another side to it. In an unguarded moment, back in the college days, as I have said, you admitted to me that you were Western-born. I always supposed afterward that you regretted either the fact or the mention of it, since you never told me any more."
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