To tell the truth, sleeping in a tent and cooking our own meals had somewhat lost their charms. We preferred a lumpy bed in a stuffy room to a hard bed on the ground; and second-rate meals served at a table someone else had taken the trouble to prepare to third-rate meals prepared with greater trouble by ourselves. As we looked wearily at each other, each hoping the other would offer to make the beds and “rustle” for food, we suddenly realized that we were homesick. We had roughed it enough, and the flesh pots beckoned. “Let’s go back to Cardston,” I said. “Let’s,” said Toby, gladly. And on all that beauty of pure woods and clear sunset we turned and fled to civilization. Fifth-rate civilization it might be, in a province as crude and unlovely as was any part of our own West in the roaring eighties. For the first time in six months we had our backs to the setting sun, the sun which had dazzled our eyes every afternoon since we left the boat at Galveston. We were leaving the great, free West, “where a man can be a man, and a woman can be a woman,” and we were going--home! CHAPTER XXV HOMEWARD HOBOES At Santa Fé we had a worn tire retreaded. “It may last you a thousand miles,” said the honest dealer. At the end of the thousand miles, the tire was in ribbons. We put it on the forward wheel and favored it all we could. In another thousand miles the canvas showed through the tread. Time went on, and a complete new set of tires went to the junk-heap, but the old retread still flaunted its tattered streamers. More than once, when both spare tires had collapsed, it carried us safely over long, desolate stretches. At last, when it had gone five or six thousand miles we ceased to worry. The conviction came to my prophetic soul that it would take us home. And it did. It took us to Toby’s door, and went flat as I turned into my own driveway. Thus did our guardian angels stay with us, like the guide’s mule, to the end. Like tired horses whose heads are turned homeward, our pace accelerated steadily as we moved east. Each day we put two hundred miles or more behind us. Montana, brown and parched like all the West, yet magnificent in the tremendous proportions of its mountains and valleys, we left with regret. We followed the Great Northern to the bleak town of Havre, then dropped south to the perfidious Yellowstone Trail. Bits of the road were unexpectedly good; for the first time since Houston the old lady’s skirts hummed in the breeze. We unwillingly put hundreds of gophers to death. The roads here were honeycombed with their nests, and as we bore down on them they poked their silly heads up to be sacrificed or ran under our wheels by the gross. We learned to dread them, for each gopher-hole meant a sharp little jolt to the car, by which more than one spring-leaf was snapped.