d out in full regalia and with an enthusiasm
that was real--while it lasted.

If you never slept on the new grass with only a bit of canvas between you
and the stars; if you have never rolled out, at daylight, and dressed
before your eyes were fair open, and rushed with the bunch over to the
mess-wagon for your breakfast; if you have never saddled hurriedly a
range-bred and range-broken cayuse with a hump in his back and seven
devils in his eye, and gone careening across the dew-wet prairie like a
tug-boat in a choppy sea; if you have never--well, if you don't know what
it's all like, and how it gets into the very bones of you so that the
hankering never quite leaves you when you try to give it up, I'm not going
to tell you. I can't. If I could, you'd know just how heady it made me
feel those first few days after we started out to "work the range."

I was fond of telling myself, those days, that I'd been more scared than
hurt, and that it was the range I was in love with, and not Beryl King at
all. She was simply a part of it--but she wasn't the whole thing, nor even
a part that was going to be indispensable to my mental comfort. I was a
free man once more, and so long as I had a good horse under me, and a
bunch of the right sort of fellows to lie down in the same tent with,
I wasn't going to worry much over any girl.

That, for as long as a week; and that, more than pages of description,
shows you how great is the spell of the range-land, and how it grips a
man.

CHAPTER XIII.

We Meet Once More.

I think it was about three weeks that I stayed with the round-up. I didn't
get tired of the life, or weary of honest labor, or anything of that sort.
I think the trouble was that I grew accustomed to the life, so that the
exhilarating effects of it wore off, or got so soaked into my system that
I began to take it all as a matter of course. And that, naturally, left
room for other things.

I know I'm no good at analysis, and that's as close as I can come to
accounting for my welching, the third week out. You see, we were working
south and west, and getting farther and farther away from--well, from the
part of country that I knew and liked best. It's kind of lonesome, leaving
old landmarks behind you; so when White Divide dropped down behind another
range of hills and I couldn't turn in my saddle almost any time and see
the jagged, blue sky-line of her, I stood it for about two days. Then
I rolled my bed one mor