“Indeed we have not,” replied the lieutenant with conviction. “I am beginning to think that the West is a pretty good place in which to live. By the way,” he went on, taking a newspaper clipping from his pocket, “here is something that our mutual friend, Dick, gave me, and said I should read once a day for a month, and then—well, then, he says I will never go East again, but remain in this great picture country. Shall I read it?”
“Oh, do, by all means,” said the girls in unison. “Well, here goes! ‘Every idea we have in the East is run with a convention. We cannot think without a chairman. Our whims have secretaries; our fads have by-laws. Literature is a club. Philosophy is a society. Our reforms are mass meetings. We cannot mourn our mighty dead without some great chairman and a half hundred vice-presidents. We remember our novelists and poets with trustees, while the immortality of a dead genius is looked after by a standing committee. Charity is an association, and theology at best only a set of resolutions.’.rdquo;
“What do you think of that?” he asked, laughing. “Isn’t that an awful slam on the East?”
“It is rather severe,” smiled Merle. “But you know, Mr. Willoughby has become a thorough Westerner. The lure of the hills and the valleys has taken complete possession of him.”
“And yet he remains unspoiled.” exclaimed the lieutenant. “But are you aware he is trying to tamper with my old allegiance to the East?”
“Indeed,” asked Grace, “in what way?”
“He wants me to resign my commission and take pot luck with him, as he terms it.”
“You couldn’t do better,” exclaimed Grace enthusiastically.
While this conversation was going on, an exciting incident was taking place only a short distance away. Young Marshall Thurston had come with his father to the round-up, and was riding about watching the operations. Chancing to pass near, Dick Willoughby overheard him use an insulting epithet in regard to Miss Farnsworth—the young man was evidently peeved that the ladies had not sought him out instead of Munson, and it was obvious, too, that he had been drinking even at that early hour in the morning.
Swiftly wheeling, Dick rode up to him with a look of anger so intense that even the cowboys who knew him were taken aback.