For
dress, he wore the common equipment of Cattleland--jingling
spurs, fringed chaps, leather cuffs, gray shirt, with kerchief
knotted loosely at the neck, and revolver ready to his hand. But
he carried them with an air, an inimitable grace, that marked him
for a prince among his fellows. Something of the kind she hinted
to him in jesting paradoxical fashion, making an attempt to win
from his sardonic gloom one of his quick, flashing smiles.
He countered by telling her what he had heard York say to Reilly
of her. "She's a princess, Cork," York had said. "Makes my
Epitaph gyurl look like a chromo beside her. Somehow, when she
looks at a fellow, he feels like a whitewashed nigger."
All of them laughed at that, but both Leroy and the sheriff tried
to banter her by insisting that they knew exactly what York
meant.
"You can be very splendid when you want to give a man that
whitewashed feeling; he isn't right sure whether he's on the map
or not," reproached the train-robber.
She laughed in the slow, indolent way she had, taking the straw
hat from her dark head to catch better the faint breath of wind
that was soughing across the plains.
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