became him well. His eyes had lost the
dreamy, introspective look of the student and author, and had grown keen
with the habit of studying objects at long range. He walked with that
peculiar, stiff-legged gait which betrays long hours spent in the
saddle, and he wore a silk handkerchief around his neck habitually and
had forgotten the feel of a dress-suit.

He answered to the name "Bud" more readily than to his own, and he made
practical use of the slang and colloquialisms of the plains without any
mental quotation marks.

By all these signs and tokens he had learned his West, and should have
taken himself back to civilization when came the frost. He had come to
get into touch with his chosen field of fiction, that he might write
as one knowing whereof he spoke. So far as he had gone, he was in touch
with it; he was steeped to the eyes in local color--and there was the
rub The lure of it was strong upon him, and he might not loosen its
hold. He was the son of his father; he had found himself, and knew that,
like him, he loved best to travel the dim trails.

Gene Wasson came in and slammed the door emphatically shut after him.
"She's sure coming," he complained, while he pulled the icicles from
his mustache and cast them into the fire. "She's going to be a real, old
howler by the signs. What yuh doing, Bud? Writing poetry?"

Thurston nodded assent with certain mental reservations; so far the
editors couldn't seem to make up their minds that it was poetry.

"Well, say, I wish you'd slap in a lot uh things about hazy, lazy, daisy
days in the spring--that jingles fine!--and green grass and the
sun shining and making the hills all goldy yellow, and prairie dogs
chip-chip-chipping on the 'dobe flats. (Prairie dogs would go all right
in poetry, wouldn't they? They're sassy little cusses, and I don't know
of anything that would rhyme with 'em, but maybe you do.) And read it
all out to me after supper. Maybe it'll make me kinda forget there's a
blizzard on."

"Another one?" Thurston got up to scratch a trench in the half-inch
layer of frost on the cabin window. "Why, it only cleared up this
morning after three days of it."

"Can't help that. This is just another chapter uh that same story. When
these here Klondike Chinooks gets to lapping over each other they never
know when to quit. Every darn one has got to be continued tacked onto
the tail of it the winter. All the difference is, you can't read the
writing; but I can