ny decisive move until I had consulted with you, and time is
pressing. Did you--er--buy as many cattle as you expected to get?" It
seemed to Billy that there was an anxious note in his voice. "Your
letters were too few and too brief to keep me perfectly informed of
your movements."

"Why, everything was lovely at my end uh the trail, Dilly--only I fell
down on them four thousand two-year-olds. Parts uh the country was
quarantined for scab, and I went way around them places. And I was
too late to see the cattlemen in a bunch when they was at the
Association--only you ain't likely to savvy that part uh the
business--and had to chase 'em all over the country. Uh course it was
my luck to have 'em stick their prices up on the end of a pole, where
I didn't feel like climbing after 'em. So I only contracted for a
couple uh thousand to be laid down in Billings somewhere between the
first and the tenth of June, at twenty-one dollars a head. It was
the best I could do this year--but next winter I can go down earlier,
before the other buyers beat me to it, and do a lot better. Don't yuh
worry, Dilly; it ain't serious."

On the contrary, Dill looked relieved, and Billy could not help
noticing it. His own face clouded a little. Perhaps Dill had lost his
money, or the bulk of it, and they couldn't do all the things they
had meant to do, after all; how else, thought Billy uneasily, could
he look like that over what should ordinarily be something of a
disappointment? He remembered that Dill, after the workings of
the cattle business from the very beginning had been painstakingly
explained to him just before Billy started south, had been anxious
to get at least four thousand head of young stock on the range that
spring. Something must have gone wrong. Maybe a bank had gone
busted or something like that. Billy stole a glance up at the other,
shambling silently along beside him, and decided that something had
certainly happened--and on the heels of that he remembered oddly that
he had felt almost exactly like this when Miss Bridger had asked him
to show her where was the coffee, and there _wasn't_ any coffee. There
was the same heavy feeling in his chest, and the same--

"I wrote you a letter three or four days ago--on the third, to be
exact," Dill was saying. "I don't suppose it reached you, however. I
was going to have you meet me in Hardup; but then your telegram was
forwarded to me there and I came on here at once. I only arrived t