"Did you wear spurs?" asked the voice of the unseen person.
"What?"
"Don't look around! I mean, did you wear spurs when you were in the Southwest? Of course you did, hugeous Spanish spurs and an enormous sombrero and woolly sheepskin trousers."
"As you say!" Phil replied.
"You see, I am doing cartoons of our hero's life," Helen explained. "Here he is as he saw himself and the Rocky Mountains when he first arrived, with his college diploma under his arm."
Only lines of hieroglyphic simplicity, and Phil in enormous spurs and sombrero, with a great roll of parchment under his arm, was looking down on some ant-hills. Only lines, but the nose and the chin under the sombrero's were unmistakably Phil's.
"Now, as our hero sees himself roping his first steer—and as he really was!" she went on. "We are all for realism."
A Phil with one arm akimbo, who roped the steer with his thumb and little finger holding a thread, was followed in the next scene by a Phil fluttering heaven high and a steer romping across the prairie.
"What next in the hero's progress?" she continued. "Undaunted, he goes on his way, our conquistadore—is that the right word in Spanish, cousin?"
"Yes," admitted Phil, who could not see the drawings or confess his curiosity about them.