CHAPTER III.
_Charming Billy Has a Fight._ If Billy Boyle had any ideals he did not recognize them as such, and he would not have known just how to answer you if you had asked him what was his philosophy of life.

He was range-bred--as purely Western as were the cattle he tended--but he was not altogether ignorant of the ways of the world, past or present.

He had that smattering of education which country schools and those of "the county seat" may give a boy who loves a horse better than books, and who, sitting hunched behind his geography, dreams of riding afar, of shooting wild things and of sleeping under the stars.
From the time he was sixteen he had lived chiefly in tents and line-camp cabins, his world the land of far horizons, of big sins, and virtues bigger.

One creed he owned: to live "square," fight square, and to be loyal to his friends and his "outfit." Little things did not count much with him, and for that reason he was the more enraged against the Pilgrim, because he did not quite know what it was all about.

So far as he had heard or seen, the Pilgrim had offered no insult to Miss Bridger--"the girl," as he called her simply in his mind.