would mutually have
agreed to stop when they met; that being the way of range horses after
carrying speech-hungry men for a season or two. If men meet out there
in the land of far horizons and do not stop for a word or two, it is
generally because there is bad feeling between them; and horses learn
quickly the ways of their masters.

"Hello," greeted Billy tentatively, eying the other measuringly
because he was a stranger. "Pretty soft going, ain't it?" He referred
to the half-thawed trail.

"Ye-es," hesitated the other, glancing diffidently down at the trail
and then up at the neighboring line of disconsolate, low hills.
"Ye-es, it is." His eyes came back and met Billy's deprecatingly,
almost like those of a woman who feels that her youth and her charm
have slipped behind her and who does not quite know whether she may
still be worthy your attention. "Are you acquainted with this--this
part of the country?"

"Well," Billy had got out his smoking material, from force of the
habit with which a range-rider seizes every opportunity for a smoke,
and singled meditatively a leaf. "Well, I kinda know it by sight, all
right." And in his voice lurked a pride of knowledge inexplicable to
one who has not known and loved the range-land. "I guess you'd have
some trouble finding a square foot of it that I ain't been over," he
added, mildly boastful.

If one might judge anything from a face as blank as that of a china
doll, both the pride and the boastfulness were quite lost upon the
stranger. Only his eyes were wistfully melancholy.

"My name is Alexander P. Dill," he informed Billy quite unnecessarily.
"I was going to the Murton place. They told me it was only ten miles
from town and it seems as though I must have taken the wrong road,
somehow. Could you tell me about where it would be from here?"

Charming Billy's cupped hands hid his mouth, but his eyes laughed.
"Roads ain't so plenty around here that you've any call to take one
that don't belong to yuh," he reproved, when his cigarette was going
well. "If Hardup's the place yuh started from, and if they headed yah
right when they turned yuh loose, you've covered about eighteen miles
and bent 'em into a beautiful quarter-circle--and how yuh ever went
and done it undeliberate gets _me_. You are now seven miles from
Hardup and sixteen miles, more or less, from Murton's." He stopped to
watch the effect of his information.

Alexander P. Dill was a long man--an exceedingly lon