“But, he’ll think you’re nothing but a cowboy,” she protested.

“Fine!” retorted Patches, quickly.  “I thank you, Miss Reid; that is really the most satisfactory compliment I have ever received.”

“You’re mocking me now,” said Kitty, puzzled by his manner.

“Indeed, I am not.  I am very serious,” he returned.  “But here he comes again.  With your gracious permission, I’ll make my exit.  Please don’t explain to the professor.  It would humiliate me, and think how it would shock and disappoint him!”

Lifting his saddle from the ground and starting toward the shed, he said in a louder tone, “Sure, I won’t ferget, Miss Kitty; an’ you kin tell your paw that there baldfaced steer o’ his’n, what give us the slip last rodeo time, is over in our big pasture.  I sure seen him thar to-day.”

During the days immediately following that first meeting, Kitty passed many hours with Professor Parkhill.  Phil and his cowboys were busy preparing for the spring rodeo.  Mrs. Baldwin was wholly occupied with ministering to the animal comforts of her earthly household.  And the Dean, always courteous and kind to his guest, managed, nevertheless, to think of some pressing business that demanded his immediate and personal attention whenever the visitor sought to engage him in conversation.  The professor, quite naturally holding the cattleman to be but a rude, illiterate and wholly materialistic creature, but little superior in intellectual and spiritual powers to his own beasts, sought merely to investigate the Dean’s mental works, with as little regard for the Dean’s feelings as a biologist would show toward a hug.  The Dean confided to Phil and Patches, one day when he had escaped to the blacksmith shop where the men were shoeing their horses, that the professor was harmlessly insane.  “Just think,” he exploded, “of the poor, little fool livin’ in Chicago for three years, an’ never once goin’ out to the stockyards even!”

It remained, therefore, for Kitty—­the only worshiper of the professor’s gods in Williamson Valley—­to supply that companionship which seems so necessary even to those whose souls are so far removed from material wants.  In short, as Little Billy put it, with a boy’s irreverence, “Kitty rode herd on the professor.”  And, strangely enough to them all, Kitty seemed to like the job.

Either because her friendship with Patches—­which had some to mean a great deal to Kitty—­outweighed her respect and admiration for the distinguished object of his fun, or because she waited for some opportunity to make the revelation a punishment to the offender, the young woman did not betray the real character of the cowboy to the stranger.  And the professor, thanks to Phil’s warning, not only refrained from investigating the name of Patches, but carefully avoided Patches himself.  In the meantime, the “typical specimen” was forced to take a small part in the table talk lest he betray himself.