stered with
remittance men, doin' nothin', and I don't aim to run no home for
incompetents. I had a son of a duke drivin' wagon for me; and he
couldn't drive nails in a snowbanks. So don't you herd up with the
idea that you can come on this ranch and loaf."

"I don't want to loaf," put in Tim, "I want a job."

"I'm willing to give you a job," replied Buck, "but it's jest an
ordinary cow-puncher's job at forty a month. And if you don't fill
your saddle, it goes to someone else."

"That's satisfactory," agreed Tim.

"All right," finished Buck, "so that's understood. Your friend Case
wanted me to give you a lot of advice. A man generally has about as
much use for advice as a cow has for four hind legs."

He went out.

"For God's sake, what's up?" I cried, leaping from my bunk.

"Hullo, Harry," said he, as though he had seen me the day before, "I've
come back."

"How come back?" I asked. "I thought you couldn't leave the estate.
Have they broken the will?"

"No," said he.

"Is the money lost?"

"No."

"Then what?"

"The long and short of it is, that I couldn't afford that estate and
that money."

"What do you mean?"

"I've given it up."

"Given it up! What for?"

"To come back here."

I took this all in slowly.

"Tim Clare," said I at last, "do you mean to say that you have given up
an English estate and fifty thousand dollars a year to be a remittance
man at five hundred, and a cow-puncher on as much more?"

"Exactly," said he.

"Tim," I adjured him solemnly, "you are a damn fool!"

"Maybe," he agreed.

"Why did you do it?" I begged.

He walked to the door and looked out across the desert to where the
mountains hovered like soap-bubbles on the horizon. For a long time he
looked; then whirled on me.

"Harry," said he in a low voice, "do you remember the camp we made on
the shoulder of the mountain that night we were caught out? And do you
remember how the dawn came up on the big snow peaks across the way--and
all the canon below us filled with whirling mists--and the steel stars
leaving us one by one? Where could I find room for that in English
paddocks? And do you recall the day we trailed across the Yuma
deserts, and the sun beat into our skulls, and the dry, brittle hills
looked like papier-mache, and the grey sage-bush ran off into the rise
of the hills; and then came sunset and the hard, dry mountains grew
filmy, like gauze veils of many colours, and melted and glowed a