"A letter from Montana for Miss Jane Bell," observed Peter, distributing the mail at the breakfast-table one May morning, nine months after the picnic at Grandfather Bell’s farm. "It strikes me these Montana letters are beginning to arrive with astonishing regularity." "They began," declared Ross, enjoying the sight of the sudden colour in Jane’s face, as she tucked the letter into her belt and tried vainly to look unconscious as she went on serving the family from a big dish of oatmeal porridge, "by coming modestly once in about three or four weeks. Then they got to once a fortnight--that was in midwinter. Along about April----" "If I were a big, grown man," murmured Jane, "I ’d never condescend to keep track of----" "Along in April," pursued Ross, unmoved, "once in ten days was the schedule. But this last, coming as it does just one short week after its predecessor, and carrying, as it does, two large red postage-stamps--which, I am confident, is underpayment----" "Stop teasing!" cried Nancy, always loyal to her sister. "Every one of you is envying Jane, wishing you could have letters from a real cowboy." "A real cowboy!" laughed Ross. "I think I see Murray Townsend getting himself up in that rig. With his pale face and thin shoulders he ’d look like the tenderest kind of a tenderfoot." Jane pulled the letter out of her belt. The previous letter had promised that this one should bring some snap-shot pictures of the writer and his surroundings. She hoped, as she broke the seal, that she should find them, feeling sure that the extra thick letter indicated that it carried the promised enclosures. As she pulled out the sheets a little packet of blue-prints dropped into her lap. She picked them up and fell to looking at them. Peter, sitting next to her, laughed to himself, as he reached for his dish of oatmeal, Jane having forgotten to serve him. But everybody forgot breakfast, as the blue-prints went round the table. All but one were scenes of ranch and camp life, bringing into view horses and cowboys of all sorts and conditions, each carefully labelled with its descriptive title. But the one at the bottom of the pack was called "the tenderfoot"--the only one of the set in which Jane’s correspondent was in evidence. "Can it be possible this is Murray?" exclaimed Mrs. Bell, studying incredulously the erect figure on horseback, life and energy in every outline, from the tilt of the wide hat to the set of the leg in the saddle. "Why, he looks as if he weighed thirty pounds more than when he went away." "By George, the fellow has n’t roughed it nearly a year for nothing, has he?" admitted Ross. "He doesn’t look the stage cowboy, either--I ’ll say that for him. Those clothes have seen wear and rain, and that hat has had the true Western shape knocked into it. It makes you envy him, does n’t it?"