Page:The man on horseback (IA manonhorseback00abdurich).pdf/107

 was not as if Tom Graves had been slow-witted or unobserving of what was going on about him.

No man of his ancestry, straight American, Scotch and English, descendant of sturdy, independent, courageous, fairly well-educated people who for generations had not felt the pinch of want nor the lessening of mentality that goes with it, who had lived away from the reek of city slums yet away, too, from the stultifying influence of meager, worked-out farms, who following the keen call in their own brains, their own imagination, had taken the trail of the ever-broadening Western frontier from Virginia via Kentucky, Kansas, and California to the Northwest; no man of his bringing up and early surroundings, with the sweep and tang of the open range about him, and the range of a decade or so ago where often a man's quickness of wit counted as much as his quickness on the draw; no such man could be slow, could be entirely unobserving.

What was wrong with him was a national American fault, rather habit, which blinded him to everything that went on about him during this, his first, visit abroad except his love for Bertha Wedekind and the frivolous, shifting interests of the passing minutes.

A national habit which caused him to see foreigners entirely through the smoked, distorting