Page:Edison Marshall--Shepherds of the wild.djvu/125

Rh He had seen some thousands of girls in his life, yet he found himself staring at the slim form on the horse as if he were gazing upon a miracle of nature. Every experience of the past few days might have been in some manner expected and he had only reacted because of qualities within himself; his experiences with Broken Fang and the coyote were wholly fitting in this wild, mountainous land, but he had never dreamed but that he had left all womankind a thousand miles behind him. This was a man's land, not a place for the tender flesh of girls. This was the home of savage beasts, a region of dark forests and forbidding peaks, never a land of gentleness and ease such as women should know. He realized with a start that evidently his good manners had been left behind him also, for he was gazing at her in open-mouthed astonishment.

If the girl on the horse had been an Indian squaw, even an aged and wrinkled frontiersman's dame, he would have felt that the axis of the world still stood at the proper angle. But this girl was white, in spite of her tan and the high color—not put on with a rabbit's foot—in her cheeks. She was young, not more than twenty-two at most. And strangest of all she was pretty past all denial.

Hugh felt as if there must be some mistake. Perhaps in these lonely days in the hills he had lost the power of discrimination. He hadn't seen a girl for endless weeks—centuries they