e for gladness, singing cheerily:

"So polish up your saddles, oil your slickers and your guns,
For we're hound for Lonesome Prairie when the green grass comes."

CHAPTER XI. FOLLOWING THE DIM TRAILS!

Thurston did not go on the horse roundup. He explained to the boys,
when they clamored against his staying, that he had a host of things to
write, and it would keep him busy till they were ready to start with
the wagons for the big rendezvous on the Yellowstone, the exact point of
which had yet to be decided upon by the Stock Association when it met.
The editors were after him, he said, and if he ever expected to get
anywhere, in a literary sense, it be-hooved him to keep on the smiley
side of the editors.

That sounded all right as far as it went, but unfortunately it did
not go far. The boys winked at one another gravely behind his back and
jerked their thumbs knowingly toward Milk River; by which pantomime they
reminded one another--quite unnecessarily that Mona Stevens had come
home. However, they kept their skepticism from becoming obtrusive, so
that Thurston believed his excuses passed on their face value. The boys,
it would seem, realized that it is against human nature for a man to
declare openly to his fellows his intention of laying last, desperate
siege to the heart of a girl who has already refused him three times,
and to ask her for the fourth time if she will reconsider her former
decisions and marry him.

That is really what kept Thurston at the Lazy Eight. His writing became
once more a mere incident in his life. During the winter, when he did
not see her, he could bring himself to think occasionally of other
things; and it is a fact that the stories he wrote with no heroine at
all hit the mark the straightest.

Now, when he was once again under the spell of big, clear, blue gray
eyes and crimply brown hair, his stories lost something of their
virility and verged upon the sentimental in tone. And since he was not a
fool he realized the falling off and chafed against it and wondered why
it was. Surely a man who is in love should be well qualified to write
convincingly of the obsession but Thurston did not. He came near going
to the other extreme and refusing to write at all.

The wagons were out two weeks--which is quite long enough for a crisis
to arise in the love affair of any man. By the time the horse roundup
was over, one Philip Thurston was in pessimistic mood and quite ready
to fol