orty-eight miles away, that they marked the Missouri
River, and that we would stop there overnight. That, if I remember,
was about the extent of our conversation that day. We smoked
cigarettes--Frosty Miller made his, one by one, as he needed them--and
thought our own thoughts. I rather suspect our thoughts were a good many
miles apart, though our shoulders touched. When you think of it, people
may rub elbows and still have an ocean or two between them. I don't know
where Frosty was, all through that long day's ride; for me, I was back in
little old Frisco, with Barney MacTague and the rest of the crowd; and
part of the time, I know, I was telling dad what a mess he'd made of
bringing up his only son.

That night we slept in a shack at the river--"Pochette Crossing" was the
name it answered to--and shared the same bed. It was not remarkable for
its comfort--that bed. I think the mattress was stuffed with potatoes; it
felt that way.

Next morning we were off again, over the same bare, brown, unpeopled
wilderness. Once we saw a badger zigzagging along a side-hill, and Frosty
whipped out a big revolver--one of those "Colt 45's," I suppose--and shot
it; he said in extenuation that they play the very devil with the range,
digging holes for cow-punchers to break their necks over.

I was surprised at Frosty; there he had been armed, all the time, and I
never guessed it. Even when we went to bed the night before, I had not
glimpsed a weapon. Clearly, he could not be a cowboy, I reflected, else
he would have worn a cartridge-belt sagging picturesquely down over one
hip, and his gun dangling from it. He put the gun away, and I don't know
where; somewhere out of sight it went, and Frosty turned off the trail and
went driving wild across the prairie. I asked him why, and he said, "Short
cut."

Then a wind crept out of the north, and with it the snow. We were climbing
low ridges and dodging into hollows, and when the snow spread a white veil
over the land, I looked at Frosty out of the tail of my eye, wondering if
he did not wish he had kept to the road--trail, it is called in the
rangeland.

If he did, he certainly kept it to himself; he went on climbing hills and
setting the brake at the top, to slide into a hollow, and his face kept
its inscrutable calm; whatever he thought was beyond guessing at.

When he had watered the horses at a little creek that was already skimmed
with ice, and unwrapped a package of sandwiches on hi