'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.