"'Mornin', Billy! 'Mornin', Doctor! You run right up to the house. I left the gate open."
Then Overland rode back, following them. Later he reappeared, minus spurs and chaps, but still clad in the garb of the range-rider. He was as proud and happy as a boy. He seemed to have dropped ten years from his shoulders. And he was strangely unlike his old boisterous self withal.
The noon sun crept through the moon-vine. Out on the wide veranda was the long table. They were a happy group at luncheon there. Even the taciturn Brand Williams had been persuaded to come. His native picturesqueness was rather effaced by a black, characterless suit of "store clothes."
Walter Stone, at the conclusion of the luncheon, asked Overland to make a speech. Nothing daunted, Overland rose briskly.
"I expect you're lookin' for me to fall off the roof of the cannery into the tomato-vat and make a large red splash. Not me. I got somethin' to say. Now the difference in droppin' a egg on the kitchen floor and breakin' it calm-like, in a saucer, ain't only the muss on the floor. You save the egg. Just recent I come nigh to losin' my whole basket. You all know who saved 'em. Not namin' any names, the same person, by jest bein' herself, and kind to everybody, put me wise to the fact that money and clothes ain't all that goes to make a man. And, at the same time, speakin' kind of orthodoxical, money and clothes has a whole lot to do with makin' a man. I just got hep to that idea recent.
"Speakin' of clothes leads me to remark that I got a new outfit up at the bunk-house. It's a automobilein' outfit. Billy says it's the correc' thing. He helped me pick it out. Which leads Billy into this here thing, too. He said to break the news gentle, and not scare anybody to death and not get 'em to thinkin' that somebody was hurt or anything like that, so I'm breakin' it to you easy. Me and Billy is goin' away. We're goin' in the Guzzuh—'God save the mush,' as the pote says. We are the Overland Red Towerist and Observation Company, Unlimited. We are goin'
"'Round the world and back again;
Heel and toe in sun and rain'—
as another pote says. Only we ride. I ain't got nothin' to say about gettin' married, or happy days, or any of that ordinary kind of stuff. I want to drink the health of my friends. I got so many and such good ones that I dassent to incriminate any particular one; so I say, lookin' at your faces like roses and lilies and—and faces, I say,—
"'Here's to California, the darling of the West,
A blessin' on those livin' here—
And God help all the rest.'"
Overland sat down amid applause. He located his tobacco and papers, rolled a cigarette with one hand, and gazed across the hills. Glancing up, he saw Louise looking at him. He smiled. "I was settin' on a crazy bronc' holdin' his head up so he couldn't go to buckin'—outside a little old adobe down in Yuma, Arizona, then. Did you ever drift away like that, just from some little old trick to make you dream?"