e a good idea to hunt up the gentleman named
Perry Potter, whom dad called his foreman. I turned around and caught a
tall, brown-faced native studying my back with grave interest. He didn't
blush when I looked him in the eye, but smiled a tired smile and said he
reckoned I was the chap he'd been sent to meet. There was no welcome in
his voice, I noticed. I looked him over critically.

"Are you the gentleman with the alliterative cognomen?" I asked him
airily, hoping he would be puzzled.

He was not, evidently. "Perry Potter? He's at the ranch." He was damnably
tolerant, and I said nothing. I hate to make the same sort of fool of
myself twice. So when he proposed that we "hit the trail," I followed
meekly in his wake. He did not offer to take my suit-case, and I was about
to remind him of the oversight when it occurred to me that possibly he
was not a servant--he certainly didn't act like one. I carried my own
suitcase--which was, I have thought since, the only wise move I had made
since I left home.

A strong but unsightly spring-wagon, with mud six inches deep on the
wheels, seemed the goal, and we trailed out to it, picking up layers of
soil as we went. The ground did not _look_ muddy, but it was; I have since
learned that that particular phase of nature's hypocrisy is called "doby."
I don't admire it, myself. I stopped by the wagon and scraped my shoes on
the cleanest spoke I could find, and swore. My guide untied the horses,
gathered up the reins, and sought a spoke on his side of the wagon; he
looked across at me with a gleam of humanity in his eyes--the first I had
seen there.

"It sure beats hell the way it hangs on," he remarked, and from that
minute I liked him. It was the first crumb of sympathy that had fallen to
me for days, and you can bet I appreciated it.

We got in, and he pulled a blanket over our knees and picked up the whip.
It wasn't a stylish turnout--I had seen farmers driving along the
railroad-track in rigs like it, and I was surprised at dad for keeping
such a layout. Fact is, I didn't think much of dad, anyway, about that
time.

"How far is it to the Bay State Ranch?" I asked.

"One hundred and forty miles, air-line," said he casually. "The train was
late, so I reckon we better stop over till morning. There's a town over
the hill, and a hotel that beats nothing a long way."

A hundred and forty miles from the station, "air-line," sounded to me like
a pretty stiff proposition to go up a