The riders were returning and the Dean and the stranger walked back down the little hill to the corral.

“You have a fine ranch here, Mr. Baldwin,” again observed the stranger.

The Dean glanced at him sharply.  Many men had tried to buy the Cross-Triangle.  This man certainly appeared prosperous even though he was walking.  But there was no accounting for the queer things that city men would do.

“It does pretty well,” the cattleman admitted.  “I manage to make a livin’.”

The other smiled as though slightly embarrassed.  Then:  “Do you need any help?”

“Help!” The Dean looked at him amazed.

“I mean—­I would like a position—­to work for you, you know.”

The Dean was speechless.  Again he surveyed the stranger with his measuring, critical look.  “You’ve never done any work,” he said gently.

The man stood very straight before him and spoke almost defiantly.  “No,
I haven’t, but is that any reason why I should not?”

The Dean’s eyes twinkled, as they have a way of doing when you say something that he likes.  “I’d say it’s a better reason why you should,” he returned quietly.

Then he said to Phil, who, having dismissed his four-footed pupil, was coming toward them: 

“Phil, this man wants a job.  Think we can use him?”

The young man looked at the stranger with unfeigned surprise and with a hint of amusement, but gave no sign that he had ever seen him before.  The same natural delicacy of feeling that had prevented the cowboy from discussing the man upon whose privacy he felt he had intruded that evening of their meeting on the Divide led him now to ignore the incident—­a consideration which could not but command the strange man’s respect, and for which he looked his gratitude.

There was something about the stranger, too, that to Phil seemed different.  This tall, well-built fellow who stood before them so self-possessed, and ready for anything, was not altogether like the uncertain, embarrassed, half-frightened and troubled gentleman at whom Phil had first laughed with thinly veiled contempt, and then had pitied.  It was as though the man who sat that night alone on the Divide had, out of the very bitterness of his experience, called forth from within himself a strength of which, until then, he had been only dimly conscious.  There was now, in his face and bearing, courage and decision and purpose, and with it all a glint of that same humor that had made him so bitterly mock himself.  The Dean’s philosophy touching the possibilities of the man who laughs when he is hurt seemed in this stranger about to be justified.  Phil felt oddly, too, that the man was in a way experimenting with himself—­testing himself as it were—­and being altogether a normal human, the cowboy felt strongly inclined to help the experimenter.  In this spirit he answered the Dean, while looking mischievously at the stranger.