“Look at our Phil,” the Dean continued, for the man beside him was a wonderful listener.  “There just naturally couldn’t be a better all round man than Phil Acton.  He’s healthy; don’t know what it is to have an hour’s sickness; strong as a young bull; clean, honest, square, no bad habits, a fine worker, an’ a fine thinker, too—­even if he ain’t had much schoolin’, he’s read a lot.  Take him any way you like—­just as a man, I mean—­an’ that’s the way you got to take ’em—­there ain’t a better man that Phil livin’.  Yet a lot of these folks would say he’s nothin’ but a cow-puncher.  As for that, Jim Reid ain’t much more than a cow-puncher himself.  I tell you, I’ve seen cow-punchers that was mighty good men, an’ I’ve seen graduates from them there universities that was plumb good for nothin’—­with no more real man about ’em than there is about one of these here wax dummies that they hang clothes on in the store windows.  What any self-respectin’ woman can see in one of them that would make her want to marry him is more than I’ve ever been able to figger out.”

If the Dean had not been so engrossed in his own thoughts, he would have wondered at the strange effect of his words upon his companion.  The young man’s face flushed scarlet, then paled as though with sudden illness, and he looked sidewise at the older man with an expression of shame and humiliation, while his eyes, wistful and pleading, were filled with pain.  Honorable Patches who had won the admiration of those men in the Cross-Triangle corrals was again the troubled, shamefaced, half-frightened creature whom Phil met on the Divide.

But the good Dean did not see, and so, encouraged by the other’s silence, he continued his dissertation.  “Of course, I don’t mean to say that education and that sort of thing spoils every man.  Now, there’s young Stanford Manning—­”

If the Dean had suddenly fired a gun at Patches, the young man could not have shown greater surprise and consternation.  “Stanford Manning!” he gasped.

At his tone the Dean turned to look at him curiously.  “I mean Stanford Manning, the mining engineer,” he explained.  “Do you know him?”

“I have heard of him,” Patches managed to reply.

“Well,” continued the Dean, “he came out to this country about three years ago—­straight from college—­and he has sure made good.  He’s got the education an’ culture an’ polish an’ all that, an’ with it he can hold his own among any kind or sort of men livin’.  There ain’t a man—­cow-puncher, miner or anything else—­in Yavapai County that don’t take off his hat to Stanford Manning.”

“Is he in this country now?” asked Patches, with an effort at self-control that the Dean did not notice.

“No, I understand his Company called him back East about a month ago.  Goin’ to send him to some of their properties up in Montana, I heard.”