Professor Everard Charles Parkhill looked the part to which, from his birth, he had been assigned by his over-cultured parents.  His slender body, with its narrow shoulders and sunken chest, frail as it was, seemed almost too heavy for his feeble legs.  His thin face, bloodless and sallow, with a sparse, daintily trimmed beard and weak watery eyes, was characterized by a solemn and portentous gravity, as though, realizing fully the profound importance of his mission in life, he could permit no trivial thought to enter his bald, domelike head.  One knew instinctively that in all the forty-five or fifty years of his little life no happiness or joy that had not been scientifically sterilized and certified had ever been permitted to stain his super-aesthetic soul.

As he came forward, he gazed at the long-limbed man on the big bay horse with a curious eagerness, as though he were considering a strange and interesting creature that could scarcely be held to belong to the human race.

“Professor Parkhill,” said Phil coolly, “you were saying that you had never seen a genuine cowboy in his native haunt.  Permit me to introduce a typical specimen, Mr. Honorable Patches.  Patches, this is Professor Parkhill.”

“Phil,” murmured Kitty, “how can you?”

The Professor was gazing at Patches as though fascinated.  And Patches, his weather-beaten face as grave as the face of a wooden Indian, stared back at the Professor with a blank, open-mouthed and wild-eyed expression of rustic wonder that convulsed Phil and made Kitty turn away to hide a smile.

“Howdy!  Proud to meet up with you, mister,” drawled the typical specimen of the genus cowboy.  And then, as though suddenly remembering his manners, he leaped to the ground and strode awkwardly forward, one hand outstretched in greeting, the other holding fast to Stranger’s bridle rein, while the horse danced and plunged about with reckless indifference to the polite intentions of his master.

The Professor backed fearfully away from the dangerous looking horse and the equally formidable-appearing cowboy.  Whereat Patches addressed Stranger with a roar of savage wrath.

“Whoa!  You consarned, square-headed, stiff-legged, squint-eyed, lop-eared, four-flusher, you.  Whoa, I tell you!  Cain’t you see I’m a-wantin’ to shake hands with this here man what the boss has interduced me to?”

Phil nearly choked.  Kitty was looking unutterable things.  They did not know that Patches was suffering from a reaction caused by the discovery that he had never before met Professor Parkhill.

“You see, mister,” he explained gravely, advancing again with Stranger following nervously, “this here fool horse ain’t used to strangers, no how, ’specially them as don’t look, as you might say, just natural like.”  He finished with a sheepish grin, as he grasped the visitor’s soft little hand and pumped it up and down with virile energy.  Then, staring with bucolic wonder at the distinguished representative of the highest culture, he asked, “Be you an honest-to-God professor?  I’ve heard about such, but I ain’t never seen one before.”