Billy
rose a little.

"If you'll wait till I saddle up, I'll go along. I guess the Svenskies
won't run off with the camp before I get back," said the Pilgrim,
and so they stayed, and afterward rode back together quite amiably
considering certain explosive elements in the party.

Perhaps Billy's mildness was due in a great measure to his
preoccupation, which made him deaf at times to what the others were
saying. He knew that they were quite impersonal in their talk, and so
he drifted into certain other channels of thought.

Was Brown going to start another cow-outfit, or was he merely going to
try his hand at farming? Billy knew that--unless he had sold it--Brown
owned a few hundred acres along the creek there; and as he rode over
it now he observed the soil more closely than was his habit, and saw
that, from a passing survey, it seemed fertile and free from either
adobe or alkali. It must be that Brown was going to try ranching.
Still, he had held out all his best stock, and Billy had not heard
that he had sold it since. Now that he thought of it, he had not heard
much about Brown since Dill bought the Double-Crank. Brown had been
away, and, though he had known in a general way that the Pilgrim
was still in his employ, he did not know in what capacity. In the
absorption of his own affairs he had not given the matter any thought,
though he had wondered at first what crazy impulse caused Brown to
sell the Double-Crank. Even now he did not know, and when he thought
of it the thing irritated him like a puzzle before it is solved.

So greatly did the matter trouble him that immediately upon reaching
the ranch he left Flora and the Pilgrim and hunted up Dill. He found
him hunched like a half-open jackknife in a cane rocker, with his legs
crossed and one long, lean foot dangling loosely before him; he was
reading "The Essays of Elia," and the melancholy of his face gave
Billy the erroneous impression that the book was extremely sad, and
caused him to dislike it without ever looking inside the dingy blue
covers.

"Say, Dilly, old Brown's putting in a ditch big enough to carry the
whole Missouri River. Did yuh know it?"

Dill carefully creased down the corner of the page where he was
reading, untangled his legs and pulled himself up a bit in the chair.
"Why, no, I don't think I have heard of it," he admitted. "If I have
it must have slipped my mind--which isn't likely." Dill was rather
proud of his capacity for keeping a