snoring of Hank Graves in the room beyond. He was trying to
adjust himself to this new condition of things, and the new
condition refused utterly to be measured by his accepted
standard.

According to that standard, he should feel repulsed and annoyed
by the familiarity of strangers who persisted in calling him
"Bud" without taking the trouble to find out whether or not he
liked it. And what puzzled Thurston and put him all at sea was
the consciousness that he did like it, and that it struck
familiarly upon his ears as something to which he had been
accustomed in the past.

Also, according to his well-ordered past, he should hate this
raw life and rawer country where could occur such brutal things
as he had that day witnessed. He should dislike a man like Park
Holloway who, having wounded a man unto death, had calmly
dismissed the subject with the regret that his aim had not been
better, so that he could have saved the county the expense of
trying and hanging the fellow. Thurston was amazed to find
that, down in the inner man of him, he admired Park Holloway
exceedingly, and privately resolved to perfect himself in the
use of fire-arms, he who had been wont to deplore the thinly
veneered savagery of men who liked such things.

After much speculation he decided that Mona Stevens would not do
for a kidnapped heroine. He could not seem to "see" her in such
a position, and, besides, he told himself that such a type of
girl did not attract him at all. She had called him a coward-
-and why? simply because he, straight from the trammels of