Out of this sightseeing delegations of good King Teddy's Gentlemen of
the Royal Bear-hounds dropped one Greenbrier Nye, of Pin Feather, Ariz.
The daily cyclone of Sixth Avenue's rush hour swept him away from the
company of his pardners true. The dust from a thousand rustling skirts
filled his eyes. The mighty roar of trains rushing across the sky
deafened him. The lightning-flash of twice ten hundred beaming eyes
confused his vision.
The storm was so sudden and tremendous that Greenbrier's first impulse
was to lie down and grab a root. And then he remembered that the
disturbance was human, and not elemental; and he backed out of it with
a grin into a doorway.
The reporters had written that but for the wide-brimmed hats the West
was not visible upon these gauchos of the North. Heaven sharpen their
eyes! The suit of black diagonal, wrinkled in impossible places; the
bright blue four-in-hand, factory tied; the low, turned-down collar,
pattern of the days of Seymour and Blair, white glazed as the letters
on the window of the open-day-and-night-except-Sunday restaurants; the
out-curve at the knees from the saddle grip; the peculiar spread of
the half-closed right thumb and fingers from the stiff hold upon the
circling lasso; the deeply absorbed weather tan that the hottest
sun of Cape May can never equal; the seldom-winking blue eyes that
unconsciously divided the rushing crowds into fours, as though they were
being counted out of a corral; the segregated loneliness and solemnity
of expression, as of an Emperor or of one whose horizons have not
intruded upon him nearer than a day's ride--these brands of the West
were set upon Greenbrier Nye.
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