he
continent for.

He sat down and wrote at length to Reeve-Howard, explaining very
carefully--and not altogether convincingly--just why he could not
possibly go home at present. After that he saddled and rode over to the
Stevens place with the book, leaving his trunk yawning emptily in the
middle of his badly jumbled belongings.

After that he spent three weeks on the beef roundup. At first he was
full of enthusiasm, and worked quite as if he had need of the wages, but
after two or three big drives the novelty wore off quite suddenly, and
nothing then remained but a lot of hard work. For instance, standing
guard on long, rainy nights when the cattle walked and walked might at
first seem picturesque and all that, but must at length, cease to be
amusing.

Likewise the long hours which he spent on day-herd, when the wind
was raw and penetrating and like to blow him out of the saddle; also
standing at the stockyard chutes and forcing an unwilling stream of
rollicky, wild-eyed steers up into the cars that would carry them to
Chicago.

After three weeks of it he awoke one particularly nasty morning and
thanked the Lord he was not obliged to earn his bread at all, to say
nothing of earning it in so distressful a fashion. There was a lull
in the shipping because cars were not then available. He promptly took
advantage of it and rode by the very shortest trail to the ranch--and
Mona. But Mona was visiting friends in Chinook, and there was no telling
when she would return. Thurston, in the next few days, owned to himself
that there was no good reason for his tarrying longer in the big,
un-peopled West, and that the proper thing for him to do was go back
home to New York.

He had come to stay a month, and he had stayed five. He could ride and
rope like an old-timer, and he was well qualified to put up a stiff
gun-fight had the necessity ever arisen--which it had not.

He had three hundred and seventy-one pictures of different phases of
range life, not counting as many that were over-exposed or under-exposed
or out of focus. He had six unfinished stories, in each of which the
heroine had big, blue-gray eyes and crimply hair, and the title and bare
skeleton of a seventh, in which the same sort of eyes and hair would
probably develop later. He had proposed to Mona three times, and had
been three times rebuffed--though not, it must be owned, with that tone
of finality which precludes hope.

He was tanned a fine brown, which