"Only one hundred, if you must know. But Steele—do you suppose he's the man his grandfather was before him—that all the Failings have been since the first days of the Oregon trail? If he is—well, my hat's off to him before he steps off the train."
The mountaineer's bronzed face was earnest and intent in the bright lights of the club. Steele thought he had known this breed. Now he began to have doubts of his own knowledge. "He won't be; don't count on it," he said humbly. "The Failings have done much for this region, and I'm glad enough to do a little to pay it back, but don't count much on this Eastern boy. He's lived in cities; besides, he's a sick man. He said so in his wire. You ought to know it before you take him in."
The bronzed face changed; possibly a shadow of disappointment came into his eyes. "A lunger, eh?" Lennox repeated. "Yes—it's true that if he'd been like the other Failings, he'd never have been that. Why, Steele, you couldn't have given that old man a cold if you'd tied him in the Rogue River overnight. Of course you couldn't count on the line keeping up forever. But I'll take him, for the memory of his grandfather."
"You're not afraid to?"
"Afraid, Hell! He can't infect those two strapping children of mine. Snowbird weighs one hundred and twenty pounds and is hard as steel. Never knew a sick day in her life. And you know Bill, of course."
Yes, Steele knew Bill. Bill weighed two hundred pounds, and he would choose the biggest of the steers he drove down to the lower levels in the winter and, twisting its horns, would make it lay over on its side. Besides, both of the men assumed that Dan must be only in the first stages of his malady.
And even as the men talked, the train that bore Dan Failing to the home of his ancestors was entering for the first time the dark forests of pine and fir that make the eternal background of the Northwest. The wind came cool and infinitely fresh into the windows of the sleeping car, and it brought, as camels bring myrrh from the East, strange, pungent odors of balsam and mountain flower and warm earth, cooling after a day of blasting sun. And these smells all came straight home to Dan. He was wholly unable to understand the strange feeling of familiarity that he had with them, a sensation that in his dreams he had known them always, and that he must never go out of the range of them again.
III
Dan didn't see his host at first. For the first instant he was entirely engrossed by a surging sense of disappointment,—a feeling that he had been tricked and had only come to another city after all. He got down on to the gravel of the station yard, and out on the gray street pavement he heard the clang of a trolley car. Trolley cars didn't fit into his picture of the West at all. Many automobiles were parked just beside the station, some of them foreign cars of expensive makes, such as he supposed would be wholly unknown on the frontier. A man in golf clothes brushed his shoulder.