low the wagons, the farther the better. Also, they could not start
too soon to please him. His thoughts still ran to blue-gray eyes and
ripply hair, but he made no attempt to put them into a story.

He packed his trunk carefully with everything he would not need on
the roundup, and his typewriter he put in the middle. He told himself
bitterly that he had done with crimply haired girls, and with every
other sort of girl. If he could figure in something heroic--only he
said melodramatic--he might possibly force her to think well of him.
But heroic situations and opportunities come not every day to a man, and
girls who demand that their knights shall be brave in face of death need
not complain if they are left knightless at the last.

He wrote to Reeve-Howard, the night before they were to start, and
apologized gracefully for having neglected him during the past three
weeks and told him he would certainly be home in another month. He said
that he was "in danger of being satiated with the Western tone" and
would be glad to shake the hand of civilized man once more. This was
distinctly unfair, because he had no quarrel with the masculine portion
of the West. If he had said civilized woman it would have been more just
and more illuminating to Reeve-Howard who wondered what scrape Phil had
gotten himself into with those savages.

For the first few days of the trip Thurston was in that frame of mind
which makes a man want to ride by himself, with shoulders hunched
moodily and eyes staring straight before the nose of his horse.

But the sky was soft and seemed to smile down at him, and the clouds
loitered in the blue of it and drifted aimlessly with no thought of
reaching harbor on the sky-line. From under his horse's feet the prairie
sod sent up sweet, earthy odors into his nostrils and the tinkle of the
bells in the saddle-bunch behind him made music in his ears--the sort of
music a true cowboy loves. Yellow-throated meadow larks perched swaying
in the top of gray sage bushes and sang to him that the world was good.
Sober gray curlews circled over his head, their long, funny bills thrust
out straight as if to point the way for their bodies to follow and
cried, "Kor-r-eck, kor-r-eck!"--which means just what the meadow larks
sang. So Thurston, hearing it all about him, seeing it and smelling it
and feeling the riot of Spring in his blood, straightened the hunch out
of his shoulders and admitted that it was all true: that the w