In his most imaginative moments, Evan Blount had never prefigured a home-coming to coincide in any detail of it with the reality.

When he opened his eyes on the morning following the night of singular adventures, the sun was shining brightly in at the bed's-head window, a cheerful fire was blazing on the hearth, and his father, a little heavier, a little grayer, but with the same ruggedly strong face and kindly eyes, was standing at his bedside.

"Father!"--and "Evan, boy!" were the simple words of greeting; but the mighty hand-grip which went with them was for the younger man a confirmation of the filial hope and a heart-warming promise for the future. Following instantly, there came a rush of mingled emotions: of astoundment that he had recognized no familiar landmark in the midnight faring through the hills or on the approach to the home of his childhood; of something akin to keen regret that the old had given place so thoroughly and completely to the new; of a feeling bordering on chagrin that he had been surprised into accepting the hospitable advances of a woman whom he had been intending to avoid, and for whom he had hitherto cherished--and meant to cherish--a settled aversion.

But at the hand-gripping moment there was no time for a nice weighing of emotions. He was in his father's house; the home-coming, some phases of which he had vaguely dreaded, was a fact accomplished, and the new life--the life which must be lived without Patricia--was fairly begun.

Also, there were many arrears to be brought up.

"Intuition, on the manward side of it at least, doesn't go," he was saying with half-boyish candor. "I was awake last night when you drove home in the motor, and I looked out of the window and saw you as you came up the steps. According to the psychics, there ought to have been some inward stirrings of recognition, but there weren't--not a single thrill. Did the little--er--did Mrs. Blount tell you that I was here?"

"She did so; but she couldn't tell me much more. Say, son, how on top of earth did you happen to blow in at midnight, with Jack Barto for your herd leader?"

"It's a fairy tale, and you won't believe it--of a Blount," was the laughing reply. "I left Boston Monday, and should have reached the capital last night. But my train was laid out by a yard wreck at Twin b.u.t.tes just before dark, and I left it and took to the hills--horseback.

Don't ask me why I did such a thing as that; I can only say that the smell of the sage-brush got into my blood and I simply had to do it."

The old cattle-king was standing with his feet planted wide apart and his hands deep in his pockets. "You hired a horse!" he chuckled, with the humorous wrinkles coming and going at the corners of the kindly eyes. "Did you have the nerve to think you were going to climb down from a three-legged stool in a Boston law office one day and ride the fifty miles from Twin b.u.t.tes to the capital the next?"

"Oh, no; I wasn't altogether daft. But knowing where I was, I did think I could ride out to Debbleby's. So I hired the bronco and set out--and that reminds me: the horse will have to be sent back to the liveryman in Twin b.u.t.tes, some way."

"Never mind the cayuse. Shackford would have made you a present of it outright if you had told him who you were. Go on with your story. It listens like a novel."

"I took the general direction all right on leaving Twin b.u.t.tes, and kept it until I got among the Lost River hogbacks. But after that I was pretty successfully lost. I'm ashamed to tell it, but about half of the time the moon didn't seem to be in the right place."

"Lost, were you? And Jack Barto found you?" queried the father.

"Barto hadn't lost me to any appreciable extent," was the half-humorous emendation. And then: "Who is this ubiquitous Barto who goes around playing the hold-up one minute and the good angel the next?"

"He is a sort of general utility man for Hathaway, the head pusher of the Twin b.u.t.tes Lumber Company. He is supposed to be a timber-cruiser and log-sealer, but I reckon he doesn't work very hard at his trade.

Down in the lower wards of New York they'd call him a boss heeler, maybe. But you say 'hold-up'; you don't mean to tell me that Jack Barto robbed you, son!"

"Oh, no; he held me up with a gun while his helpers pulled me off the bronco and hog-tied me, and then fell to discussing with the other two the advisability of knocking me on the head and dropping me into Lost River Canyon--that's all. Of course, I knew they had stumbled upon the wrong man; and after a while I succeeded in making Barto accept that hypothesis; at least, he accepted it sufficiently to bring me here for identification. Since he wouldn't talk, and I didn't recognize the trail or the place, I hadn't the slightest notion of my whereabouts--not the least in the world; didn't know where he was taking me or where I had landed when we stopped here."

The big man was leaning against the foot-rail of the bed and frowning thoughtfully. "Talked about dropping you into Lost River, did they? H'm.

I reckon we'll have to look into that a little. Who set them on, son?

Got any idea of that?"

"I have a very clear idea: it was this man Hathaway you speak of--a big ranchman named Griggs told me his name. He came across in the Pullman with me from Omaha; middle-aged, tall, and slim, with a hatchet face and owlish eyes. Before I learned his name we had talked a bit--killing time in the smoking-room. He said he was interested in mines and timber.

Along toward the last he got the notion into his head that I was a special agent of some kind, on a mission for the Bureau of Forestry, and I was foolish enough to let him escape with the impression uncorrected."

"That was Pete Hathaway, all right," was the senator's comment. "His company has been cutting timber in the Lost River watershed reserves, and he probably thought you were aiming to get him. You say he sent Barto after you?"

"I'm only guessing at that part of it. When I rode away from Twin b.u.t.tes he was standing on the porch of the tavern, talking to Barto and two others; and I'm pretty sure he pointed me out to them. An hour or so later, three hors.e.m.e.n pa.s.sed me on the mesa, one after another. I couldn't see them, but I heard them. It might have been another hour or more past that when they potted me."

"You gave them your name?"

"Yes; and that seemed to tangle them a little. Barto said he believed I was lying, but, anyway, he'd give me a chance to 'prove up.' Then they brought me here, and your--er--Mrs. Blount kindly stepped into the breach for me."

"You didn't know Honoria when you saw her?" queried the father.

"No; I wasn't in the least expecting--that is, I--you may remember that I had never met her," stammered the young man, who had risen on his elbow among the pillows.

The older man walked to the window and stood looking out upon the distant mountains for a full minute before he faced about to say: "We might as well run the boundary lines on this thing one time as another, son. You don't like Honoria; you've made up your mind you're not going to let yourself like her. I don't mean to make it hard for either of you if I can dodge it. This is her home; but it is also yours, my boy. Do you reckon you could--"

Evan Blount made affectionate haste to stop the half-pathetic appeal.

"Don't let that trouble you for a minute," he interposed. "I--Mrs.

Blount is a very different person from the woman I have been picturing her to be; and if she were not, I should still try to believe that we are both sufficiently civilized not to quarrel." Then: "Have 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 _p.r.o.nto_. 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 _p.r.o.nto_ 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 under cultivation; how with the inpouring of the new population had come new blood, new methods, good roads, the telephone, the rural mail route, and other civilizing agencies.

The young man groaned. "I know," he mourned. "I've lost my birth-land; it's as extinct as the prehistoric lizards whose bones we used to find sticking in the old gully banks on Table Mesa. By the way, that reminds me: are there any of those giant fossils left? I was telling Professor Anners about them the other day, and he was immensely interested."

"We're all fossils--we older folks of the cattle-raising times," laughed the man whom Richard Gantry had called the "biggest man in the State."

"But there are some of the petrified bones left, too, I reckon. If the professor is a friend of yours, we'll get him a State permit to dig all he wants to."

"Yes; Professor Anners is a friend of mine," was the younger Blount's half-absent rejoinder. But after the admission was made he qualified it.

"Perhaps I ought to say that he is as much a friend as his daughter will permit him to be."

The qualifying clause was not thrown away upon the senator.

"What-all has the daughter got against you, son?" he asked mildly.

"Nothing very serious," said Patricia's lover, with a laugh which was little better than a grimace. "It's merely that she is jealous of any one who tries to share her father with her. Next to her career--"

"That's Boston, isn't it?" interrupted the ex-king of the cattle ranges.

Then he added: "I'm right glad it hasn't come in your way to tie yourself up to one of those 'careers,' Evan, boy."

Now all the influences of this red-letter day had been humanizing, and when Evan Blount remembered the preservation of the old "Circle-Bar"

ranch-house, and the motive which had prompted it, he told his brief love-tale, hiding nothing--not even the hope that in the years to come Patricia might possibly find her career sufficiently unsatisfying to admit the thin edge of some wedge of reconsideration. He felt better after he had told his father. It was highly necessary that he should tell some one; and who better?

David Blount listened with the far-away look in his eyes which the son had more than once marked as the greatest of the changes chargeable to the aging years.

"Think a heap of her, do you, son?" he said, when the ambling saddle-animals had covered another half-mile of the homeward journey.

"So much that it went near to spoiling me when she finally made me realize that I couldn't hold my own against the 'career,'" was the young man's answer. Then he added: "I want work, father--that is what I am out here for; the hardest kind of work, and plenty of it; something that I can put my heart into. Can you find it for me?"