And if you don't fill your saddle, it goes to someone else." "That's satisfactory," agreed Tim.
"All right," finished Buck, "so that's understood.

Your friend Case wanted me to give you a lot of advice.

A man generally has about as much use for advice as a cow has for four hind legs." He went out.
"For God's sake, what's up ?" I cried, leaping from my bunk.
"Hullo, Harry," said he, as though he had seen me the day before, "I've come back." "How come back ?" I asked.

"I thought you couldn't leave the estate.
Have they broken the will ?" "No," said he.
"Is the money lost ?" "No." "Then what ?" "The long and short of it is, that I couldn't afford that estate and that money." "What do you mean ?" "I've given it up." "Given it up! What for ?" "To come back here." I took this all in slowly.
"Tim Clare," said I at last, "do you mean to say that you have given up an English estate and fifty thousand dollars a year to be a remittance man at five hundred, and a cow-puncher on as much more ?" "Exactly," said he.
"Tim," I adjured him solemnly, "you are a damn fool!" "Maybe," he agreed.
"Why did you do it ?" I begged.
He walked to the door and looked out across the desert to where the mountains hovered like soap-bubbles on the horizon.

For a long time he looked; then whirled on me.
"Harry," said he in a low voice, "do you remember the camp we made on the shoulder of the mountain that night we were caught out?
And do you remember how the dawn came up on the big snow peaks across the way--and all the canon below us filled with whirling mists--and the steel stars leaving us one by one?
Where could I find room for that in English paddocks?
And do you recall the day we trailed across the Yuma deserts, and the sun beat into our skulls, and the dry, brittle hills looked like papier-mache, and the grey sage-bush ran off into the rise of the hills; and then came sunset and the hard, dry mountains grew filmy, like gauze veils of many colours, and melted and glowed and faded to slate blue, and the stars came out?
The English hills are rounded and green and curried, and the sky is near, and the stars only a few miles up.