ve you
breakfasted yet--you and Mrs. Blount? But of course you have, long ago."

"Breakfasted?--without you? Not much, son! And that reminds me: I was to
come up here and see if you were awake, and if you were, I was to send
Barnabas up with your coffee."

"You may tell Uncle Barnabas that I haven't acquired the coffee-in-bed
habit yet," laughed the lazy one, sitting up. "Also, you may make my
apologies to Mrs. Blount and tell her I'll be down _pronto_. There;
doesn't that sound as if I were getting back to the good old sage-brush
idiom? Great land! I haven't heard anybody say _pronto_ since I was
knee-high to a hop-toad!"

Farther on, when he was no longer in the first lilting flush of the new
impressions, Evan Blount was able to look back upon that first day at
Wartrace Hall with keen regret; the regret that, in the nature of
things, it could never be lived over again. In all his forecastings he
had never pictured a homecoming remotely resembling the fact. In each
succeeding hour of the long summer day the edges of the chasm of the
years drew closer together; and when, in the afternoon, his father put
him on a horse and rode with him to a corner of the vast home domain, a
corner fenced off by sentinel cottonwoods and watered by the single
small irrigation ditch of his childish recollections; rode with him
through the screening cottonwoods and showed him, lying beyond them, the
old ranch buildings of the "Circle-Bar," untouched and undisturbed; his
heart was full and a sudden mist came before his eyes to dim the
picture.

"I've kept it all just as it used to be, Evan," the father said gently.
"I thought maybe you'd come back some day and be sure-enough
disappointed if it were gone."

The younger man slipped from his saddle and went to look in at the open
door of the old ranch-house. Everything was precisely as he remembered
it: the simple, old-fashioned furniture, the crossed quirts over the
high wooden mantel, his mother's rocking-chair ... that was the final
touch; he sat down on the worn door-log and put his face in his hands.
For now the gaping chasm of the years was quite closed and he was a boy
again.

Still later in this same first day there were ambling gallops along the
country roads, and the father explained how the transformation from
cattle-raising to agriculture and fruit-growing had come about; how the
great irrigation project in Quaretaro Canyon had put a thousand square
miles of the fertile mesa