“I have a love for-r you that will grow-ow;
  If you’ll have a coon for a beau—­”

trilled Weary, and snapped the wires off a bale of hay and tore it open, in a hurry to finish.

A familiar, pungent odor smote his nostrils and he straightened.  For a minute he stood perfectly still; then his fingers groped tremblingly in the hay, closed upon something, and every nerve in him quivered.  He held it fast in his shaking hands and sat down weakly upon the torn bale.

It was a branch off a sage bush—­dry, shapeless, bruised in the press, but it carried its message bravely.  Holding it close to his face, drinking in the smell of it greedily, he closed his eyes involuntarily.

Great, gray plains closed in upon him—­dear, familial plains, scarred and broken with sharp-nosed hills and deep, water-worn coulees gleaming barren and yellow in the sun.  The blue, blue sky was bending down to meet the hills, with feathery, white clouds trailing lazily across.  His cheeks felt the cool winds which flapped his hat-brim and tingled his blood.  His knees pressed the throb and life, the splendid, working muscles of a galloping horse.

Weary’s head went down upon his hands, with the bit of sage pressed hard against his cheek.

Now he was racing over the springy sod which sent a sweet, grassy smell up to meet him.  Wild range cattle lumbered out of his way, ran a few paces and stopped to gaze after him with big, curious eyes.  Before him stood the white-tented camp of the round-up, and the rope corral was filled with circling horses half hidden by the veil of dust thrown upward by their restless, trampling hoofs.  Now he was in the midst of them, a coil of rope in his left hand; his right swung the loop circling over his head.  And the choking dust was in his eyes and throat, and in his nostrils the rank odor of many horses.  Men were shouting to one another above the confusion.  Oaths were hurled after a horse which warily dodged the rope.  Saddles strewed the ground, bits clanked, spurs jingled, care-free laughs brightened the clamor.

The scene shifted.  He was sitting, helpless, in the saddle while Glory carried him wantonly over the hills, shaking his head to make the broken bridle rattle.  Now he was stopping in front of a vine-covered porch, where a girl lay sleeping in a hammock—­a girl with soft, dark hair falling down to the floor in a heavy braid.  Again, he was sitting on the school-house steps, holding a smoking gun in his hand, and the schoolma’am was standing, flushed and reproving, before him.  The wind came and fluttered her skirts—­

“What’s the matter, Bill?  Yuh sick?”

Weary raised a white, haggard face.  The plains, the blue sky, the sunshine, the wind, the girl—­were gone.  He was sitting upon a torn bale of hay in a livery stable in Portland.  Through the wide, open door he could see the muddy street.  Gray water-needles darted incessantly up from the pavement where the straight lines of rain struck.  On the roof the rain was drumming a monotone.  In his fingers was a crumpled bit of gray sage-brush.