Connie was convinced she could get enough material to last a lifetime.  No detective was hotter on the scent of a trail than she.  Never two cowboys met in a secluded corner in the lobby to divide their hardly earned coins, but Connie sauntered slowly by, catching every word, noting the size of every coin that changed possession.  No gaily garbed horseman could signal to a girl of his admiration, but Connie caught the motion first, and was taking mental notes for future coinage.  They were not people to her, just material.  She loved them, she reveled in them, she dreamed of them, just as a collector of curios gloats over the treasures he amasses.  She classified them in a literary note-book for her own use, and kept them on file for instant reference.

When they went to the fair-grounds, early, in order to secure a comfortable seat for David where he should not miss one twist of a rider’s supple body, they were as delighted as children truanting from school.  It was the most exhilarating thing in the world,—­this clever little trick on the sleeping porch and the white cot, on egg-nogs and beef juice and buttermilk.  No wonder their faces tingled with excitement and their eyes sparkled with delight.

Connie was surprised that the girls were pretty, really pretty, with pink and white skin and polished finger nails, those girls in the silk blouses and khaki shirts, those girls with the wide sombrero and the iron muscles, who rode the bucking horses, and raced around the track, and did a thousand other appalling things that pink-skinned, shiny-nailed girls were not wont to do back home.  They stayed at the Bijou, a whole crowd of them, and Connie never let them out of her sight until they closed their bedroom doors for the night.  They talked in brief broken sentences, rather curtly, but their voices were quiet and low, and they weren’t half as slangy as cowgirls, by every literary precedent, ought to be.  They were not like Connie, of course, tall and slim, with the fine exalted face, with soft pink palms and soft round arms.  And their striking saddle costumes were not half as curious to Fort Morgan as Connie’s lacy waists, and her tailored skirts, and her frilly little silk gowns.  But they were more curious to Connie.

She tried to picture herself in a sombrero like that, with gauntlets on her hands, and with a fringed leather skirt that reached to her knees, and with a scarlet silk blouse and a yellow silk belt,—­and even her distinctly literary imagination could not compass such a miracle.  But she was sure if she ever could rig herself up like that, she would look like a dream, and she really envied the cowgirls, who leaped head first from the saddle but always landed right side up.

People of another world, well, yes.  But there are ways of getting together.