After that he spent three weeks on the beef roundup. At first he was full of enthusiasm, and worked quite as if he had need of the wages, but after two or three big drives the novelty wore off quite suddenly, and nothing then remained but a lot of hard work. For instance, standing guard on long, rainy nights when the cattle walked and walked might at first seem picturesque and all that, but must at length, cease to be amusing.
Likewise the long hours which he spent on day-herd, when the wind was raw and penetrating and like to blow him out of the saddle; also standing at the stockyard chutes and forcing an unwilling stream of rollicky, wild-eyed steers up into the cars that would carry them to Chicago.
After three weeks of it he awoke one particularly nasty morning and thanked the Lord he was not obliged to earn his bread at all, to say nothing of earning it in so distressful a fashion. There was a lull in the shipping because cars were not then available. He promptly took advantage of it and rode by the very shortest trail to the ranch—and Mona. But Mona was visiting friends in Chinook, and there was no telling when she would return. Thurston, in the next few days, owned to himself that there was no good reason for his tarrying longer in the 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.
By all these signs and tokens he had learned his West, and should have taken himself back to civilization when came the frost. He had come to get into touch with his chosen field of fiction, that he might write as one knowing whereof he spoke. So far as he had gone, he was in touch with it; he was steeped to the eyes in local color—and there was the rub The lure of it was strong upon him, and he might not loosen its hold. He was the son of his father; he had found himself, and knew that, like him, he loved best to travel the dim trails.
Gene Wasson came in and slammed the door emphatically shut after him. "She's sure coming," he complained, while he pulled the icicles from his mustache and cast them into the fire. "She's going to be a real, old howler by the signs. What yuh doing, Bud? Writing poetry?"
Thurston nodded assent with certain mental reservations; so far the editors couldn't seem to make up their minds that it was poetry.
"Well, say, I wish you'd slap in a lot uh things about hazy, lazy, daisy days in the spring—that jingles fine!—and green grass and the sun shining and making the hills all goldy yellow, and prairie dogs chip-chip-chipping on the 'dobe flats. (Prairie dogs would go all right in poetry, wouldn't they? They're sassy little cusses, and I don't know of anything that would rhyme with 'em, but maybe you do.) And read it all out to me after supper. Maybe it'll make me kinda forget there's a blizzard on."
"Another one?" Thurston got up to scratch a trench in the half-inch layer of frost on the cabin window. "Why, it only cleared up this morning after three days of it."
"Can't help that. This is just another chapter uh that same story. When these here Klondike Chinooks gets to lapping over each other they never know when to quit. Every darn one has got to be continued tacked onto the tail of it the winter. All the difference is, you can't read the writing; but I can."
"I've got some mail for yuh, Bud. And old Hank wanted me to ask yuh if you'd like to go to Glasgow next Thursday and watch old Lauman start the Wagner boys for wherever's hot enough. He can get yuh in, you being in the writing business. He says to tell yuh it's a good chance to take notes, so yuh can write a real stylish story, with lots uh murder and sudden death in it. We don't hang folks out here very often, and yuh might have to go back East after pointers, if yuh pass this up."
"Oh, go easy. It turns me sick when I think about it; how they looked when they got their sentence, and all that. I certainly don't care to see them hanged, though they do deserve it. Where are the letters?" Thurston sprawled across the table for them. One was from Reeve-Howard; he put it by. Another had a printed address in the corner—an address that started his pulse a beat or two faster; for he had not yet reached that blase stage where he could receive a personal letter from one of the "Eight Leading" without the flicker of an eye-lash. He still gloated over his successes, and was cast into the deeps by his failures.
He held the envelope to the light, shook it tentatively, like any woman, guessed hastily and hopefully at the contents, and tore off an end impatiently. From the great fireplace Gene watched him curiously and half enviously. He wished he could get important-looking letters from New York every few days. It must make a fellow feel that he amounted to something.
"Gene, you remember that story I read to you one night— that yarn about the fellow that lived alone in the hills, and how the wolves used to come and sit on the ridge and howl o' nights—you know, the one you said was 'out uh sight'? They took it, all right, and—here, what do you think of that?" He tossed the letter over to Gene, who caught it just as it was about to be swept into the flame with the draught in Thurston, in the days which he spent one of the half-dozen Lazy Eight line-camps with Gene, down by the river, had been writing of the West—writing in fear and trembling, for now he knew how great was his subject and his ignorance of it. In the long evenings, while the fire crackled and the flames played a game they had invented, a game where they tried which could leap highest up the great chimney; while the north wind whoo-ooed around the eaves and fine, frozen snow meal swished against the one little window; while shivering, drifting range cattle tramped restlessly through the sparse willow-growth seeking comfort where was naught but cold and snow and bitter, driving wind; while the gray wolves hunted in packs and had not long to wait for their supper, Thurston had written better than he knew. He had sent the cold of the blizzards and the howl of the wolves; he had sent bits of the wind-swept plains back to New York in long, white envelopes. And the editors were beginning to watch for his white envelopes and to seize them eagerly when they came, greedy for what was within. Not every day can they look upon a few typewritten pages and see the range-land spread, now frowning, now smiling, before them.
"Gee! they say here they want a lot the same brand, and at any old price yuh might name. I wouldn't mind writing stories myself." Gene kicked a log back into the flame where it would do the most good. His big, square-shouldered figure stood out sharply against the glow.
Thurston, watching him meditatively, wanted to tell him that he was the sort of whom good stories are made. But for men like Gene—strong, purposeful, brave, the West would lose half its charm. He was like Bob in many ways, and for that Thurston liked him and, stayed with him in the line-camp when he might have been taking his ease at the home ranch.
It was wild and lonely down there between the bare hills and the frozen river, but the wildness and the loneliness appealed to him. It was primitive and at times uncomfortable. He slept in a bunk built against the wall, with hard boards under him and a sod roof over his head. There were times when the wind blew its fiercest and rattled dirt down into his face unless he covered it with a blanket. And every other day he had to wash the dishes and cook, and when it was Gene's turn to cook, Thurston chopped great armloads