Wider and wider grew her circle of devoted friends--wild and desperate men who rarely knew a roof and whose hands stayed at no deed, but who knew with unerring accuracy the value of a real woman.
For each of these rude, silent, awkward range riders, who stammered in all speech except to men or horses, and who stumbled in all locomotion but that of the saddle, Mary Ellen had a kind spot in her soul, never ceasing to wonder as she did at the customs and traditions of their life.

Pinky Smith, laid up at the Halfway House with a broken leg (with which he had come in the saddle for over fifty miles), was blither in bed than he had ever been at table.

Ike Wallace, down with a fever at the same place, got reeling into saddle at dawn of a cheerless day, and rode himself and a horse to death that day in stopping a stampede.

Pain they knew not, fear they had not, and duty was their only god.

They told her, simply as children, of deeds which now caused a shudder, now set tingling the full blood of enthusiasm, and opened up unconsciously to her view a rude field of knight-errantry, whose principles sat strangely close with the best traditions of her own earlier land and time.