The result was that every one of the mares was knocked down to Marianne at a ludicrously low price; so low that when it was over and Coles strolled about with her to indicate the size of her bargain she felt that she was moving in a dream.
"It's easy to see that you're not Western," he said in the end, "but you have a Western horse to thank for putting this deal through--I mean Alcatraz." "He's too ugly for that," said Marianne, and yet on her way back to the hotel she realized that the sun-faded chestnut had truly proved a gold mine to her.

It had been, she felt, the luckiest day of her business life, for she knew that the price she had paid for the mares was less than half a reasonable valuation of them.

Here was her ranch ready stocked, so to speak, with fine horses.

It only needed, now, to end the tyrannical sway of Lew Hervey and in that fighting man of men, Red Perris, Marianne felt that the solution lay.
Once in her room at the hotel, she looked about her in some dismay.

Of course she was merely an employer receiving a prospective employee to examine his qualifications, but she also remained, in spite of herself, a girl receiving a man.