“Better run along home,” laughed Jim; “your mamma will be angry.”

To prove that this consideration carried no weight, Bennington stayed ten minutes longer.  Then he descended the five flights of stairs deliberately enough, but once out of earshot of his friends, he ran several blocks.  Before going into the house he took off his shoes.  In spite of the precaution, his mother called to him as he passed her room.  It was half past ten.

Beck and Hench kicked de Laney’s chair aside, and drew up more comfortably before the fire; but James would have none of it.  He seemed to be excited.

“No,” he vetoed decidedly.  “You fellows have got to get out!  I’ve got something to do, and I can’t be bothered.”

The visitors grumbled.  “There’s true hospitality for you,” objected they; “turn your best friends out into the cold world!  I like that!”

“Sorry, boys,” insisted James, unmoved.  “Got an inspiration.  Get out!  Vamoose!”

They went, grumbling loudly down the length of the stairs, to the disgust of the Lady with the Piano on the floor below.

“What’re you up to, anyway, Jimmie?” inquired the brother with some curiosity.

James had swept a space clear on the table, and was arranging some stationery.

“Don’t you care,” he replied; “you just sit down and read your little Omar for a while.”

He plunged into the labours of composition, and Bert sat smoking meditatively.  After some moments the writer passed a letter over to the smoker.

“Think it’ll do?” he inquired.

Bert read the letter through carefully.

“Jeems,” said he, after due deliberation, “Jeems, you’re a blooming genius.”

James stamped the envelope.

“I’ll mail it for you when I go out in the morning,” Bert suggested.

“Not on your daily bread, sonny.  It is posted now by my own hand.  We won’t take any chances on this layout, and that I can tell you.”

He tramped down four flights and to the corner, although it was midnight and bitter cold.  Then, with a seraphic grin on his countenance, he went to bed and slept the sleep of the just.

The envelope was addressed to a Mr. James Fay, Spanish Gulch, South Dakota.

CHAPTER II

THE STORY-BOOK WEST

When a man is twenty-one, and has had no experience, and graduates from a small college where he roomed alone in splendour, and possesses a gift of words and a certain delight in reading, and is thrown into new and, to him, romantic surroundings—­when all these stars of chance cross their orbits, he begins to write a novel.  The novel never has anything to do with the aforesaid new and romantic surroundings; neither has it the faintest connection with anything the author has ever seen.  That would limit his imagination.