Page:Jackson Gregory--joyous trouble maker.djvu/84

68 the mat of dry needles the winds had shaken from the waving limbs above him. Selecting a spot which suited his fancy he went whistling about his task, the bit of canvas which had served as outside wrapper for his bedding placed down first for warmth, his saddle dragged into place for pillow, his rifle in its case just under the outer edge of his blankets less through a desire to have it handy than through long habit. He drew off his boots, completed his simple preparations for the night, slipped in between his blankets with a big sigh of content.

"When a man can have this sort of thing for nothing," he mused quite as he had done many a time before, quite as many another man had done before Bill Steele came down into the world, "why does he sweat for money to buy himself electric lights that are not in it with the stars, music that tries to copy and can't touch the sound of falling water, a bed that isn't in the same class with a pile of fresh fir boughs or a heap of pine needles?"

The thoughts of a contented man on the verge of drowsing are not usually logically connected.

"That Turk Wilson is a man, a real man," he pondered. "I don't know that either Napoleon or Richard of the Lion Heart had much on him. … I wonder how little Trixie is going to accept the news?"

And as he went to sleep, conscious of something tranquilly maternal in the brooding solitudes about him, his last thought was of the vanished mother who, when Billy Steele was a very little boy, had held him in her arms before she tucked him in for the good night kiss.