Pleased as a child over a Christmas stocking, he straightway mounted the beautiful beast and galloped away to the south, still led by Chance, the jester.
He returned in a week, enamored alike of his horse and of the ranch he had discovered.

He was going back, he said.

There were cattle by the thousands--and he was a cattleman, from the top of his white sombrero to the tips of his calfskin boots, for all he had bent his back laboriously all summer over a hole in the ground, and had idled in town since Thanksgiving.

He was a cowboy (vaquero was the name they used in those pleasant valleys) and so was his friend.

And he had found a cowboy's paradise, and a welcome which a king could not cavil at.