"Oh, she isn't worryin' any about me; I haven't had a letter from her for two years. All I've got now is Jack, and he'd be no earthly good on the trail. He'd sure lose his glasses in a fight, and then he couldn't tell a grizzly from a two-year-old cow. So you see, there's nothing to hinder me from going anywhere. I'm footloose. I want to spend one summer in the Flat Top country. Ute Jim tells me it's fine. Then I want to go into the Wind River Mountains for elk. Old Talfeather, chief of the Ogallalahs, has promised to take me into the Big Horn Range. After that I'm going down into the southwest, down through the Uncompagre country. Reynolds says they're the biggest yet, and I'm going to keep right down into the Navajo reservation. I've got a bid from old Silver Arrow, and then I'm going to Walpi and see the Mokis dance. They say they carry live rattlesnakes in their mouths. I don't believe it: I'm going to see. Then I swing 'round to the Grand Canon of the Colorado. They say that's the sorriest gash in the ground that ever happened. Reynolds gave me a letter to old Hance; he's the man that watches to see that no one carries the hole away. Then I'm going to take a turn over the Mohave desert into Southern California. I'm due at the Yosemite Valley about a year from next fall. I'll come back over the divide by way of Salt Lake." He was on his feet, and his eyes were glowing. He seemed to have forgotten all women in the sweep of his imaginative journey. "Oh, that will be grand! How will you do it?" "On old Kintuck, if his legs don't wear off." "How will you live?" "Forage where I can. Turn to and help on a 'round-up,' or 'drive' where I can--shoot and fish--oh, I'll make it if it takes ten years." "Then what?" Mary asked, with a curious intonation. "Then I'll start for the Northwest," he replied after a little hesitation--"if I live. Of course the chances are I'll turn up my toes somewhere on the trail. A man is liable to make a miss-lick somewhere, but that's all in the game. A man had better die on the trail than in a dead furrow." Mary looked at him with dreaming eyes. His strange moods filled her with new and powerful emotions. The charm of the wild life he depicted appealed to her as well as to him. It was all a fearsome venture, but after all it was glorious. The placid round of her own life seemed for the moment intolerably commonplace. There was epic largeness in the circuit of the plainsman's daring plans. The wonders of Nature which he catalogued loomed large in the misty knowledge she held of the West. She cried out: "Oh, I wish I could see those wonderful scenes!" He turned swiftly: "You can; I'll take you." She shrank back. "Oh, no! I didn't mean that--I meant--some time----" His face darkened. "In a sleeping car, I reckon. That time'll never come."