Page:The man on horseback (IA manonhorseback00abdurich).pdf/39

Rh "Love to me is a romantic thing, and you—I mean, American men—are so terribly, terribly prosy, so commonplace!"

Tom Graves was hurt. Not personally hurt, but hurt in his Americanism, his patriotism. Ht was a narrow patriotism, geographically limited, but it was clean and good and very decent.

"Bertha," he said, "pardon me—but you don't know what you're talking about!"

"Oh, don't I?"

"You don't. Romance? Is that what you are after?"

"Yes," she said stubbornly.

"All right. And aren't we Americans romantic enough for anybody who cares for that sort of thing? Why, girl, is there anything more romantic in the wide world than a typical American whose great-grandfather, rifle in arm and knife in boot, came out of Virginia into Kentucky in the days when Kentucky was the farthest frontier? Not for gain, but just to see what was going on behind the ranges? Whose grandfather drifted into Kansas when it was 'Bloody' Kansas and thence via Panama to California in the first great gold rush? Whose father mined and ranched and played poker and drank his red liquor from Alaska to the Sierras?"

"Meaning yourself?"

"You bet your life! I guess I've read some, back on the old homestead, in the long winter evenings in my father's tattered old books! I read a lot about your Brian Boru, and Richard the Lion-Hearted, and Tamerlane, and Frederick Barbarossa, and Roland, and all the other guys with their long, foreign, stem-winding names! But, say, for real, live, kicking