didn't care whether anybody
understood him or not. It's a blind trail, lots of the way, and on some
pages I just bog down."

She smiled sympathetically. "Many of us have that trouble with him." She
put "Diana" back on the shelf and held up the poems of Robert Browning.

"And this?"

"Oh, do you read that, too?" he counterquestioned with sparkling
curiosity. She could see that he was enlivened beyond his
self-consciousness for the moment. "Well, I do, too, in spots. He's
pretty good in spots. But other times he's choppy and talky and has a
hard time getting into the saddle. Why, sometimes when Ben Crider is
talking to himself, it would sound just like Browning, if you broke it
up into poetry lengths and gave it a good title."

"And this you like, too?" She was opening a volume of Whitman.

"_Sure!_" he rang out. "Don't you? There's the man." He began walking
about with a fine smile that was almost a friendly grin. She felt
suddenly sure that he had never talked about the books before, and that
it was a kind of feast day for him.

"Yes," he continued easily; "when I get to feeling too much alone up
here I pretend I see him striding in off the trail, his head up,
sniffing the air, his eyes just _eating_ these big hills, and he'd march
right in and sit down. Only I can't ever think of what we'd say. I
reckon we'd sit here without a word. He must have had wonderful eyes.
He's good in winters when you're holed up here in the snow and get on
edge with nothing to do for five or six months but feed the stock and
keep a water hole open. Sometimes I wonder if Ben and I won't come out
crazy in the spring, and then I read old Whitman and he makes me feel
all easy-like and sure of myself."

He paused again, but she only waited.

"I had a funny thought last winter," he pursued. "It seemed to me that
if people turn into other things when they die--the way some folks
believe, you know--that Whitman must have become a whole world when _he_
died, whirling away somewhere off in space; a fine, big, fresh world,
with mountains and valleys and lakes, with big rivers and little ones,
and forests and plains and people, good people and bad people, he just
liked all sorts--it didn't seem to make much difference to him what they
were, so they were people--and he'd carry them all on his back and
breathe in and out and feel great."

He laughed as if the idea still delighted him, and she laughed with him.

"I'd like to have told him that,