"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