If Ridgway expected his opponent to pay his flippant gibe the honor of
repartee, he was disappointed. To be sure, Hobart, admirably erect in his
slender grace, was moved to a slight, disdainful smile, but it evidenced
scarcely the appreciation that anybody less impervious to criticism than
Ridgway would have cared to see.
CHAPTER 2. THE FREEBOOTER
When next Virginia Balfour saw Waring Ridgway she was driving her trap
down one of the hit-or-miss streets of Mesa, where derricks, shaft-houses,
and gray slag-dumps shoulder ornate mansions conglomerate of many
unharmonious details of architecture. To Miss Balfour these composites and
their owners would have been joys unalloyed except for the microbe of
society ambition that was infecting the latter, and transforming them from
simple, robust, self-reliant Westerners into a class of servile,
nondescript newly rich, that resembled their unfettered selves as much as
tame bears do the grizzlies of their own Rockies. As she had once
complained smilingly to Hobart, she had not come to the West to study
ragged edges of the social fringe.
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