“What do you care, anyway?” asked Reeve-Howard philosophically. “It
isn't as if you depended on the work for a living. Why worry over the
fact that a mere pastime fails to be financially a success. You don't
need to write--”
“Neither do you need to slave over those dry-point things,” Thurston
retorted, in none the best humor with his comforter “You've an income
bigger than mine; yet you toil over Grecian-nosed women with untidy hair
as if each one meant a meal and a bed.”
“A meal and a bed--that's good; you must think I live like a king.”
“And I notice you hate like the mischief to fail, even though.”
“Only I never have failed,” put in Reeve-Howard, with the amused
complacency born of much adulation.
Thurston kicked a foot-rest out of his way. “Well, I have. The fashion
now is for swashbuckling tales with a haze of powder smoke rising
to high heaven. The public taste runs to gore and more gore, and
kidnappings of beautiful maidens-bah!”
“Follow the fashion then--if you must write. Get out of your pink tea
and orchid atmosphere, and take your heroines out West--away out, beyond
the Mississippi, and let them be kidnapped. Or New Mexico would do.”
“New Mexico is also beyond the Mississippi, I believe,” Thurston hinted.
“Perhaps it is. What I mean is, write what the public wants, since you
don't relish failure. Why don't you do things about the plains? It
ought to be easy, and you were born out there somewhere. It should come
natural.”
“I have,” Thurston sighed. “My last rejection states that the local
color is weak and unconvincing. Hang the local color!” The foot-rest
suffered again.
Reeve-Howard was getting into his topcoat languidly, as he did
everything else. “The thing to do, then,” he drawled, “is to go out and
study up on it. Get in touch with that country, and your local color
will convince. Personally though, I like those little society skits you
do--”
“Skits!” exploded Thurston. “My last was a four-part serial. I never did
a skit in my life.”
“Beg pardon-which is more than you did after accusing my studies of
having untidy hair. Don't look so glum, Phil. Go out and learn your
West; a month or so will put you up to date--and by Jove! I half envy
you the trip.”
That is what put the idea into Thurston's head; and as Thurston's ideas
generally bore fruit of one sort or another, he went out that very day
and ordered from his tailor a complete riding outfit, and because he
was a good customer the tailor consented to rush the work. It seemed to
Thurston, looking over cuts of the very latest styles in riding clothes,
that already he was breathing the atmosphere of the plains.
That night he stayed at home and dreamed, of the West. His memory,
coupled with what he had heard and idealized by his imagination,
conjured dim visions of what he had once known had known and forgotten;
of a land here men and conditions harked back to the raw foundations
of civilization; where wide plains flecked with sage-brush and ribboned
with faint, brown trails, spread away and away to a far sky-line. For
Phil Thurston was range-born, if not range-bred, His father had chosen
always to live out on the edge of things--out where the trails of men
are dim and far apart-and the silent prairie bequeaths a heritage of
distance-hunger to her sons.
While he brooded grew a keen longing to see again the little town
huddled under the bare, brown hills that shut out the world; to see the
gay-blanketed Indians who stole like painted shadows about the place,
and the broad river always hurrying away to the sunrise. He had been
afraid of the river and of the bare hills and the Indians. He felt that
his mother, also, had been afraid. He pictured again--and he picture was
blurred and indistinct-the day when strange men had brought his father
mysteriously home; men who were silent save for the shuffling of their
feet, and who carried their big hats awkwardly in their hands.
There had been a day of hushed voices and much weeping and gloom, and
he had been afraid to play. Then they had carried his father as
mysteriously away again, and his mother had hugged him close and cried
bitterly and long. The rest was blank. When one is only five, the
present quickly blurs what is past, and he wondered that, after
all these years, he should feel the grip of something very like
homesickness--and for something more than half forgotten. But though
he did not realize it, in his veins flowed the adventurous blood of his
father, and to it the dim trails were calling.
In four days he set his face eagerly toward the dun deserts and the
sage-brush gray.
At Chicago a man took the upper berth in Thurston's section, and settled
into the seat with a deep sigh--presumably of thankfulness. Thurston,
with the quick eye of those who write, observed the whiteness of his
ungloved hands, the coppery tan of cheeks and throat, the clear keenness
of his eyes, and the four dimples in the crown of his soft, gray hat,
and recognized him as a fine specimen of the Western type of farmer,
returning home from the stockman's Mecca. After that he went calmly back
to his magazine and forgot all about him.
Twenty miles out, the stranger leaned forward and tapped him lightly on
the knee. “Say, I hate to interrupt yuh,” he began in a whimsical drawl,
evidently characteristic of the man, “but I'd like to know where it is
I've seen yuh before.”
Thurston glanced up impersonally, hesitated between annoyance and a
natural desire to, be courteous, and replied that he had no memory of
any previous meeting.
“Mebby not,” admitted the other, and searched the face of Thurston with
his keen eyes. It came to Phil that they were also a bit wistful, but he
went unsympathetically back to his reading.
Five miles more and be touched Thurston again, apologetically yet
insistently. “Say,” he drawled, “ain't your name Thurston? I'll bet
a carload uh steers it is--Bud Thurston. And your home range is Fort
Benton.”
Phil stared and confessed to all but the “Bud.”
“That's what me and your dad always called yuh,” the man asserted.
“Well, I'll be hanged! But I knew it. I knew I'd run acrost yuh
somewheres. You're the dead image uh your dad, Bill Thurston. And me and
Bill freighted together from Whoop-up to Benton along in the seventies.
Before yuh was born we was chums. I don't reckon you'd remember me? Hank
Graves, that used to pack yuh around on his back, and fill yuh up on
dried prunes--when dried prunes was worth money? Yuh used to call 'em
'frumes,' and--Why, it was me with your dad when the Indians pot-shot
him at Chimney Rock; and it was me helped 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 in
material; all yuh got to do is foller the Lazy Eight through till
shipping time.”
Thurston had not intended learning to be a cow-puncher, or following
the Lazy Eight or any other hieroglyphic through 'till shipping
time--whenever that was.
But facing Hank Graves, he had not the heart to tell him so, or that he
had planned to spend only a month--or six weeks at most--in the West,
gathering local color and perhaps a plot or two? and a few types.
Thurston was great on types.
The train slowed at a little station with a dismal red section house in
the immediate background and a red-fronted saloon close beside. “Here
we are,” cried Graves, “and I ain't sorry; only I wisht you was going
to stop right now. But I'll look for yuh in three or four days at the
outside. So-long, Bud. Remember, the Lazy Eight's your hang-out.”