While I rested he prepared our supper. Disappointment in love does not always show itself in the appetite, and I was as hungry as a coyote. All day new sights and experiences had been crowding in upon me. The exhilaration of the wild Plains was beginning to pulse in my veins. I had come into a strange, untried world. The past, with its broken ties and its pain and loss, must be only a memory that at my leisure I might call back; but here was a different life, under new skies, with new people. The sunset lights, the gray evening shadows, and the dip and swell of the purple distances brought their heartache; but now I was hungry, and Morton was making johnny cakes and frying bacon; wild plums were simmering on the fire, and coffee was filling the room with the rarest of all good odors vouchsafed to mortal sense. At the supper table my host went directly to my case by asking, "Have you come out here to prospect or to take hold?" "To take hold," I answered. "Are you tired after your journey?" he queried. "I? No. A night's sleep will fix me." I looked down at my strong arms, and stalwart limbs. "You sleep well?" His questions were brief. "I never missed but one night in twenty-one years, except when I sat up with a sick boy one Summer," I replied. "When was that one night?" "Oh, during the war when the border ruffians and Copperheads terrorized our town." "You are like your father, I see." He did not say in what particular; and I added, "I hope I am." We finished the meal in silence. Then we sat down by the west doorway and saw the whole Saline Valley shimmer through the soft glow of twilight and lose itself at length in the darkness that folded down about it. A gentle breeze swept along from somewhere in the far southwest, a thousand insects chirped in the grasses. Down by the river a few faint sounds of night birds could be heard, and then loneliness and homesickness had their time, denied during every other hour of the twenty-four. After a time my host turned toward me in the gloom and looked steadily into my eyes. "He's taking my measure," I thought. "Well," I said, "will I do?" "Yes," he answered. "Your father told me once in the army that his boy could ride like a Comanche, and turn his back to a mark and hit it over his shoulder." He smiled. "That's because one evening I shot the head off a scarecrow he had put up in the cherry tree when I was hiding around a corner to keep out of his sight. All the Springvale boys learned how to ride and shoot and to do both at once, although we never had any shooting to do that really counted." "Baronet"--there was a tone in Morton's voice that gripped and held me--"you have come here in a good time. We need you now. Men of your build and endurance and skill are what this West's got to have." "Well, I'm here," I answered seriously.