The Lure of the Dim Trails

as if you depended on the work for a living. Why worry over the fact that

one the best humor with his comforter "You've an income bigger than mine; yet you t

's good; you must thin

e like the mischief t

n Reeve-Howard, with the amused c

r swashbuckling tales with a haze of powder smoke rising to high heaven. The pub

and orchid atmosphere, and take your heroines out West-away out, beyo

nd the Mississippi, I be

n't relish failure. Why don't you do things about the plains? It ought to

es that the local color is weak and unconvincing.

do, then," he drawled, "is to go out and study up on it. Get in touch with that country, and

y last was a four-part serial.

g untidy hair. Don't look so glum, Phil. Go out and learn your West; a mo

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 se

e 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 r

and the broad river always hurrying away to the sunrise. He had been afraid of the river and of the bare hills and the Indians. He felt that his mother, also, had been afraid. He pictured again-and he picture

and cried bitterly and long. The rest was blank. When one is only five, the present quickly blurs what is past, and he wondered that, after all these years, he should feel the grip of something v

eagerly toward the dun dese

, observed the whiteness of his ungloved hands, the coppery tan of cheeks and throat, the clear keenness of his eyes, and the four dimples in the crown of his soft, gray hat, and

e. "Say, I hate to interrupt yuh," he began in a whimsical drawl, evidently cha

nnoyance and a natural desire to, be courteous, and r

ston with his keen eyes. It came to Phil that they were also a

stently. "Say," he drawled, "ain't your name Thurston? I'll bet a carl

confessed to a

the seventies. Before yuh was born we was chums. I don't reckon you'd remember me? Hank Graves, that used to pack yuh around on his back, and fill yuh up on dried prunes-when dried prunes was worth money? Yuh used to call 'em 'frumes,' and-Why, it was me with y

' if he seen me coming a mile off. Doggone your measly hide, where's all them pink apurns

ap 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" shou

her that made his blood tingle with pride; his father, whom he had almost forgotten, yet who had lived b

nce been racing noisily over the silent prairies spread invitingly with tender green-great, l

e green bottom huddled a cluster of pygmy cattle and mounted men; farther down were

to remember, Bud, the Lazy Eight's your home from now on. We'll make a cow-puncher of yuh in no time; you've got it in yuh, or yuh wouldn't look so much like your dad. And you can write sto

er, or following the Lazy Eight or any other hierogl

anned to spend only a month-or six weeks at most-in the West, gathering local

saloon close beside. "Here we are," cried Graves, "and I ain't sorry; only I wisht you was going to stop right now.