ge left in Gantry's office at the
capital, the man in search of his boyhood crossed quickly to a
livery-stable opposite the station, bargained for a saddle-horse,
borrowed a poncho and a pair of leggings, and prepared to break
violently, for the moment at least, with all the civilized traditions.
He would go and see Debbleby--drop in upon the old horse-breeder without
warning, and thus get his first revivified impression of the homeland
unmixed with any of the disappointing changes which were doubtless
awaiting him at the real journey's end.

Now it chanced that the livery-stable was an adjunct to the single hotel
in the small sawmill town, and as Blount was mounting to ride he saw the
thin-faced man, whom the ranchman, Griggs, had named for him, standing
on the porch of the hotel in earnest talk with three others who, from
their appearance, might have figured either as "timber jacks" or
cowboys. Blount was on the point of recognizing his companion of the
Pullman smoking-compartment as he rode past the hotel to take the trail
to the northward, but a curious conviction that the gentleman with the
bird-of-prey eyes was making him the subject of the earnest talk with
the three men of doubtful occupation restrained him. A moment later,
when he looked back from the crossing of the railroad track, he saw that
all four of the men on the porch were watching him. This he saw; and if
the backward glance had been prolonged for a single instant he might
also have seen a big, barrel-bodied man with a red face stumbling out of
the side door of the shack hotel to make vigorous and commanding signals
to stop him. But this he missed.

There was an excuse for the oversight as well as for the speedy blotting
out of the picture of the four men watching him from the porch of the
hotel. With a fairly good horse under him, with the squeak of the
saddle-leather in his ears and the smell of it in his nostrils, and with
the wide world of the immensities into which to ride unhampered and
free, the lost boyhood was found. Not for the most soul-satisfying
professional triumph the fettered East could offer him would he have
curtailed the free-reined flight into the silent wilderness by a single
mile.

For the first half-hour of the invigorating gallop the fugitive from
civilization had the sunset glow to help him find the trail. After that
the moon rose, and the landmarks, which had seemed more or less familiar
in daylight, lost their remembered