omewhere within reach.

That's what I thought. When things tasted flat in old Frisco, I wasn't
dead sure why, and maybe I didn't want to be sure why. When I couldn't get
hold of anything that had the old tang, I laid it all to a hankering after
round-up.

Even when we drove around the end of White Divide, and got up on a ridge
where I could see the long arm that stretched out from the east side of
King's Highway, I wouldn't own up to myself that there was the cause of
all my bad feelings. I think Frosty knew, all along; for when I had sat
with my face turned to the divide, and had let my cigarette go cold while
I thought and thought, and remembered, he didn't say a word. But when
memory came down to that last ride through the pass, and to Shylock shot
down by the corral, at last to Frosty standing, tall and dark, against the
first yellow streak of sunrise, while I rode on and left him afoot beside
a half-dead horse, I turned my eyes and looked at his thin, thoughtful
face beside me.

His eyes met mine for half a minute, and he had a little twitching at the
corners of his mouth. "Chirk up," he said quietly. "The chances are she'll
come back this summer."

I guess I blushed. Anyway, I didn't think of anything to say that would be
either witty or squelching, and could only relight my cigarette and look
the fool I felt. He'd caught me right in the solar plexus, and we both
knew it, and there was nothing to say. So after awhile we commenced
talking about a new bunch of horses that dad had bought through an agent,
and that had to be saddle-broke that summer, and I kept my eyes away from
White Divide and my mind from all it meant to me.

The old ranch did look good to me, and Perry Potter actually shook hands;
if you knew him as well as I do you'd realize better what such a
demonstration means, coming from a fellow like him. Why, even his lips are
always shut with a drawstring--from the looks--to keep any words but what
are actually necessary from coming out. His eyes have the same look, kind
of pulled in at the corners. No, don't ever accuse Perry Potter of being a
demonstrative man, or a loquacious one.

I had two days at the ranch, getting fitted into the life again; on the
third the round-up started, and I packed a "war-bag" of essentials, took
my last summer's chaps down off the nail in the bunk-house where they had
hung all that time as a sort of absent-but-not-forgotten memento, one of
the boys told me, and starte