your mother straighten things
up so she could pull out, back where she come from. She never took to
the West much. How is she? Dead? Too bad; she was a mighty fine woman,
your mother was.

"Well, I'll-be-hanged! Bud Thurston little, tow-headed Bud that used to
holler for 'frumes' if he seen me coming a mile off. Doggone your measly
hide, where's all them pink apurns yuh used to wear?" He leaned back and
laughed--a silent, inner convulsion of pure gladness.

Philip Thurston was, generally speaking, a conservative young man
and one slow to make friends; slower still to discard them. He was
astonished to feel a choky sensation in his throat and a stinging of
eyelids, and a leap in his blood. To be thus taken possession of by
a blunt-speaking stranger not at all in his class; to be addressed
as "Bud," and informed that he once devoured dried prunes; to be told
"Doggone your measly hide" should have affronted him much. Instead, he
seemed to be swept mysteriously back into the primitive past, and to
feel akin to this stranger with the drawl and the keen eyes. It was the
blood of his father coming to its own.

From that hour the two were friends. Hank Graves, in his whimsical
drawl, told Phil things about his father that made his blood tingle
with pride; his father, whom he had almost forgotten, yet who had lived
bravely his life, daring where other men quailed, going steadfastly upon
his way when other men hesitated.

So, borne swiftly into the West they talked, and the time seemed short.
The train had long since been racing noisily over the silent prairies
spread invitingly with tender green--great, lonely, inscrutable, luring
men with a spell as sure and as strong as is the spell of the sea.

The train reeled across a trestle that spanned a deep, dry gash in the
earth. In the green bottom huddled a cluster of pygmy cattle and mounted
men; farther down were two white flakes of tents, like huge snowflakes
left unmelted in the green canyon.

"That's the Lazy Eight--my outfit," Graves informed Thurston with the
unconscious pride of possession, pointing a forefinger as they whirled
on. "I've got to get off, next station. Yuh want to remember, Bud, the
Lazy Eight's your home from now on. We'll make a cow-puncher of yuh in
no time; you've got it in yuh, or yuh wouldn't look so much like your
dad. And you can write stories about us all yuh want--we won't kick.
The way I've got the summer planned out, you'll waller chin-deep i