him had sloshed and snorted in his ablutions, and his wet clothes were steaming on his back when he sat down to his meal.
At Mrs. Ellison's suggestion he had hung his coat in the sun and come to breakfast in shirt sleeves, as he had done in more or less notable company before that day. It was a conventional gray woolen shirt, such as range men wore from the Nueces to the Little Missouri, adorned by a narrow blue necktie, the ends of it tucked into his bosom.
Mrs. Ellison looked him over swiftly, keenly, with an eye to his good points, having come from a horse-breeding family. She noted his small, well-set head, his thin nostrils, his nose somewhat out of proportion in the general meagerness of his face and, withal, the somber, self-communing look of him which seemed to tell of hardships and penances which had refined him down from something of different type and made him a man.
That he was a man, in the range sense of the word, she was sure. However Sid Coburn had picked him up, she was certain he had not done it to give him sanctuary from the consequence of any misdeed by which man or woman had suffered. Plainly he was beneath his capabilities in a hired man's capacity on the range. That any man lost dignity in such pursuit she hardly would have admitted, not having the enlarged outlook upon life that her daughter had gained by broader contact with the world. Due to this narrowness of outlook, Mrs. Ellison was entirely satisfied with her lot.
She was a placid, deliberate woman of fifty, who bore her years well, with much of the grace of youth still on
