rudely, for he had a feeling that
once out of the saddle he would have difficulty in getting into it
again. Besides, Mona was not at home, according to her mother.

So they did not tarry, and Thurston reached the Lazy Eight alive, but
with the glamour quite gone from his West. If he had not been the son of
his father, he would have taken the first train which pointed its
nose to the East, and he would never again have essayed the writing
of Western stories or musical verse which sung the joys of galloping
blithely off to the sky-line. He had just been galloping off to a
sky-line that was always just before and he had not been blithe; nor did
the memory of it charm. Of a truth, the very thought of things Western
made him swear mild, city-bred oaths.

He choked back his awe of the cook and asked him, quite humbly, what
was good to take the soreness from one's muscles; afterward he had crept
painfully up the stairs, clasping to his bosom a beer bottle filled with
pungent, home-made liniment which the cook had gravely declared "out uh
sight for saddle-galls."

Hank Graves, when he heard the story, with artistic touches from the
cook, slapped his thigh and laughed one of his soundless chuckles. "The
son-of-a-gun! He's the right stuff. Never whined, eh? I knew it. He's
his dad over again, from the ground up." And loved him the better.

CHAPTER IV. THE TRAIL-HERD

Thurston tucked the bulb of his camera down beside the bellows and
closed the box with a snap. "I wonder what old Reeve would say to that
view," he mused aloud.

"Old who?"

"Oh, a fellow back in New York. Jove! he'd throw up his dry-point heads
and take to oils and landscapes if he could see this."

The "this" was a panoramic view of the town and surrounding valley of
Billings. The day was sunlit and still, and far objects stood up with
sharp outlines in the clear atmosphere. Here and there the white tents
of waiting trail-outfits splotched the bright green of the prairie.
Horsemen galloped to and from the town at top speed, and a long, grimy
red stock train had just snorted out on a siding by the stockyards where
the bellowing of thirsty cattle came faintly like the roar of pounding
surf in the distance.

Thurston--quite a different Thurston from the trim, pale young man who
had followed the lure of the West two weeks before--drew a long breath
and looked out over the hurrying waters of the Yellowstone. It was good
to be alive and young, and to live