Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. Billy Brue Finds His Man EACH spring the old man grew restive and raw like an unbroken colt. And when the distant mountain peaks began to swim in their summer haze, and the little rushing rivers sang to him, pleading that he come once more to follow them up, he became uncontrollable. Every year at this time he alleged, with a show of irritation, that his health was being sapped by the pernicious indulgence of sleeping on a bed inside a house. He alleged, further, that stocks and bonds were but shadows of wealth, that the old mines might any day become exhausted, and that security for the future lay only in having one member of the family, at least, looking up new pay-rock against the ever possible time of adversity. " They ain't got to makin' calendars yet with the rainy day marked on 'em," he would say. " A'most any one of them innocent lookin' Mondays or Tuesdays or Wednesdays is liable to be it when you get right up on to it. I'll have to start my old bones out again, I see that. Things are be- ginnin' to green up a'ready." When he did go it was always understood to be positively for not more than two weeks. A list of his reasons for extending the time each year to three or four months would constitute the ideal monograph on human duplicity. When hard- pushed on his return, he had once or twice been even brazen enough to assert that he had lost his way 'in the mountain fastnesses. But, for all his protestations, no one when he left in June expected to see him again before September at the earliest. In these solitary tours he was busy and happy, working and playing. " Work," he would say, " is something you want to get done; play is something you jest like to be doin'. Snoopin' up these gulches is both of 'em to me." And so he loitered through the mounta...