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“Why don’t they get another Chink?”, the cowboy grumbled.

“Well, as I understand it, they have wrote somewheres for one, but they haven’t heard yet,” said Pearsall.

“No, nor they won’t,” was Missouri’s opinion. “A Chink’s plumb shy of one of these here lonesome ranches. I bet I’m in for a life sentence,” for a ranch rider hates to cook.

Nothing that really could have been called a neighborhood existed in the cattle country of the Lame Jones County of that day, yet the Van Brunts had not been at the Three Sorrows a week before there was an invitation for Miss Valeria to bring Hilda and Burch to spend the day at the Capadine ranch, six miles east of them, and enjoy the company of Clark Capadine, Jr., and the ranch’s young guests, the two Marchbanks children. Shorty drove them over in the buckboard—a vehicle Hilda approved of far more than the shiny closed carriage at home in New York.

To Hilda that visit was a first introduction into the life of her peers as she was to find it from that time on. Clarkie Capadine was a good-natured boy of ten, whom Hilda would have liked very much if she had been capable that day of any natural or comfortable sentiments. But the Marchbanks boy, an advanced person whose name was Lafayette, shortened and pronounced in the Southern fashion, “Fayte,” scorned her utterly. He scorned also his sister Maybelle, five years younger than himself, and therefore near Hilda’s own age. Yet his contempt of Maybelle was nothing worse than the male intolerance of the foolish female, while Hilda learned from him, coldly, insultingly, that she was a tenderfoot. She was not only a child, and a girl at that—she was a tenderfoot. Did she know what chaparajos were?—tapaderos?—latigos?—a cinch, even? She did not. Maybelle was not expected to deal much in these terms on account of her deficiencies as a girl; but Hilda didn’t even know what such things were for! She was a tenderfoot—that’s what she was!