“You may tell Uncle Barnabas that I haven’t acquired the coffee-in-bed habit yet,” laughed the lazy one, sitting up.  “Also, you may make my apologies to Mrs. Blount and tell her I’ll be down pronto.  There; doesn’t that sound as if I were getting back to the good old sage-brush idiom?  Great land!  I haven’t heard anybody say pronto since I was knee-high to a hop-toad!”

Farther on, when he was no longer in the first lilting flush of the new impressions, Evan Blount was able to look back upon that first day at Wartrace Hall with keen regret; the regret that, in the nature of things, it could never be lived over again.  In all his forecastings he had never pictured a homecoming remotely resembling the fact.  In each succeeding hour of the long summer day the edges of the chasm of the years drew closer together; and when, in the afternoon, his father put him on a horse and rode with him to a corner of the vast home domain, a corner fenced off by sentinel cottonwoods and watered by the single small irrigation ditch of his childish recollections; rode with him through the screening cottonwoods and showed him, lying beyond them, the old ranch buildings of the “Circle-Bar,” untouched and undisturbed; his heart was full and a sudden mist came before his eyes to dim the picture.

“I’ve kept it all just as it used to be, Evan,” the father said gently.  “I thought maybe you’d come back some day and be sure-enough disappointed if it were gone.”

The younger man slipped from his saddle and went to look in at the open door of the old ranch-house.  Everything was precisely as he remembered it:  the simple, old-fashioned furniture, the crossed quirts over the high wooden mantel, his mother’s rocking-chair ... that was the final touch; he sat down on the worn door-log and put his face in his hands.  For now the gaping chasm of the years was quite closed and he was a boy again.

Still later in this same first day there were ambling gallops along the country roads, and the father explained how the transformation from cattle-raising to agriculture and fruit-growing had come about; how the great irrigation project in Quaretaro Canyon had put a thousand square miles of the fertile mesa under cultivation; how with the inpouring of the new population had come new blood, new methods, good roads, the telephone, the rural mail route, and other civilizing agencies.

The young man groaned.  “I know,” he mourned.  “I’ve lost my birth-land; it’s as extinct as the prehistoric lizards whose bones we used to find sticking in the old gully banks on Table Mesa.  By the way, that reminds me:  are there any of those giant fossils left?  I was telling Professor Anners about them the other day, and he was immensely interested.”

“We’re all fossils—­we older folks of the cattle-raising times,” laughed the man whom Richard Gantry had called the “biggest man in the State.”  “But there are some of the petrified bones left, too, I reckon.  If the professor is a friend of yours, we’ll get him a State permit to dig all he wants to.”