big, un-peopled West, and that the proper thing for him to do was

go back home to New York.

He had come to stay a month, and he had stayed five. He could
ride and rope like an old-timer, and he was well qualified to
put up a stiff gun-fight had the necessity ever arisen--which it
had not.

He had three hundred and seventy-one pictures of different
phases of range life, not counting as many that were over-exposed
or under-exposed or out of focus. He had six unfinished
stories, in each of which the heroine had big, blue-gray eyes
and crimply hair, and the title and bare skeleton of a seventh,
in which the same sort of eyes and hair would probably develop
later. He had proposed to Mona three times, and had been three
times rebuffed-- though not, it must be owned, with that tone of
finality which precludes hope.

He was tanned a fine brown, which became him well. His eyes had
lost the dreamy, introspective look of the student and author,
and had grown keen with the habit of studying objects at long
range. He walked with that peculiar, stiff-legged gait which
betrays long hours spent in the saddle, and he wore a silk
handkerchief around his neck habitually and had forgotten the
feel of a dress-suit.

He answered to the name "Bud" more readily than to his own, and
he made practical use of the slang and colloquialisms of the
plains without any mental quotation marks.