"I hope that time will come before a man there gets to the end of things. He was hard with me, my father, Jed--mighty hard. But I know he was right. Perhaps I'm not doing all I could for his comfort, perhaps I'm making a bad gamble, but when I go back I want to be as I believe every man can be--at some time in his life." He turned his eyes on the little, huddled figure that rode at his side. "Then, when I've seen New York once more, with all its artificiality and dishonest motives and its unrealities--from the painted faces of its women to its very reasons for living and doing--I'll come back here, Jed; back to the Captain and to the hills. "I've seen the other! Oh, I've seen it, not from the ground up, but from the ground down! I've gone to the very subcellars of rottenness--and there's nothing to attract. But here there's a bigness, a freedom, an incentive to be real that you won't find in places where men huddle together and lie and cheat and scheme!" They returned to the ranch in late afternoon and found that a passing cowboy had left mail for them--papers and circulars--and a picture postal card. VB had picked up the bundle of mail first, and for a long time he gazed at the gaudy colorings of that card. Palm trees, faultlessly kept lawns, a huge, rambling building set back from the road that formed a foreground, and a glimpse of a superblue Pacific in the distance. He held it in his fingers and took in every detail. Then, with a queer little feeling about his middle, he turned it over. A small hand--he remembered just how firm the fingers were that held the pen--had written: +--------------------------+ | Mr. VB | | Ranger, Colorado | +--------------------------+ And across the correspondence section of the card was inscribed this: Give my very best regards to the Captain and to Mr. Avery. Home early in April. He read the message again and again, looking curiously at the way she had formed the letters. Then he muttered: "Why didn't she send it to Jed--or to the Captain?" When Jed came into the cabin VB asked him, as though it were a matter of great concern: "Where's that calendar we had around here?" That night the young fellow lay awake long hours. The thirst had come again. Not so ravishing as it used to be, not inspiring all the old terror, but still it was there, and as it tugged at his throat and teased from every fiber of his being, he thought of Gail Thorpe--and tossed uneasily. "Why?" he asked himself. "Why is it that the thirst calls so loudly when I think of that girl?" He could not answer, and suddenly the query seemed so portentous that he sat up in bed, prying the darkness with his eyes, as though to find a solution of the enigma there. And his wandering mind, circling and doubling and shooting out in crazy directions, settled back on the Captain, and with it the hurt of his jumping nerves became dulled.