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In a minute the door opened again, and Buck Johnson himself came in.

“How do,” said he; “I saw you ride up.”

“How do you do,” replied Tim.

“I know all about you,” said Buck, without any preliminaries; “your man, Case, has wrote me. I don’t know your reasons, and I don’t want to know–it’s none of my business–and I ain’t goin’ to tell you just what kind of a damn fool I think you are–that’s none of my business, either. But I want you to understand without question how you stand on the ranch.”

“Quite good, sir,” said Tim very quietly.

“When you were out here before I was glad to have you here as a sort of guest. Then you were what I’ve heerd called a gentleman of leisure. Now you’re nothin’ but a remittance man. Your money’s nothin’ to me, but the principle of the thing is. The country is plumb pestered 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 and faded to slate blue, and the stars came out? The English hills are rounded and green and curried, and the sky is near, and the stars only a few miles up. And do you recollect that dark night when old Loco and his warriors were camped at the base of Cochise’s Stronghold, and we crept down through the velvet dark wondering when we would be discovered, our mouths sticky with excitement, and the little winds blowing?”