r a song, but now he found it could not be
re-bought for real money. The situation was hopeless. There was no
retracing of steps. But still the old sounds could not be divorced from
his ears; and the old salt-pork barrel was an unpardonable culprit. If
he could only sit once again on the old stump which had not been hewn
away in the centre of his dug-out, it would be a source of joy to him.
If he could only smoke the old kin-i-kin-nick pipe, his appetite would
be satisfied.

One day he climbed into his auto and made a bee-line for the old ranch.
He would have a rock on that old stump if it should cause a scandal in
society. But the spot where the dug-out once stood was now bare. The
cabin had been burned to the ground by the new proprietors. He went home
like a whipped cur. A link in his beautiful past had vanished. An
impassable chasm, of his own making, yawned between him and his desire,
and he cursed the day which lured him away from his natural, green
pastures.

One day he disappeared entirely, and when he did not return for several
days, and his wife was insane with grief, a search party was sent out in
quest of him. They found him camping on the old trail, dressed in his
aboriginal attire, eating beans and bacon with his knife, and chewing
venison Indian fashion.

"This is the only square meal I have had since I left the woods," he
said, when they captured him; and he filled his pipe with kin-i-kin-nick
and puffed the sweet, mild fumes. He had returned to his natural
element.

"I have been rounding up stock," he said, "and I shot this buck just
over the hill there. Here, dig in, it is jake."

He had to live among the steers, and the coyotes, and the wild trails in
accordance with his early training; original things were his food.
Society, and his wife, demanded that he remain on the surface, but his
aboriginal inclinations lured him to the woods; so, during six months of
every year he was an Indian to all intents and purposes. Early in May he
would load a cayuse with beans, bacon, canned milk, frying pan and
blankets, and with this treasure he would take to the hills and bask
the livelong summer among the junipers, the firs, and the spruces; and
he would eat huckleberries, choke-cherries and soap-o-lalies, and smoke
kin-i-kin-nick until his complexion assumed the tan of the Chilcoten
Indian.

The lure of the limelight had been great, but it had worn off just as
soon as he had a surfeit of its false glories