These second
steps came more out of the air than the first. And my brain played me
the evil trick of showing me a dead man in a gray flannel shirt.

"It's two, you see, travelling with one hawss, and they take turns
riding him."

"Why, of course!" I exclaimed; and we went along for a few paces.

"There you are," said the Virginian, as the trail proved him right.
"Number one has got on. My God, what's that?"

At a crashing in the woods very close to us we both flung round and
caught sight of a vanishing elk.

It left us confronted, smiling a little, and sounding each other with
our eyes. "Well, we didn't need him for meat," said the Virginian.

"A spike-horn, wasn't it?" said I.

"Yes, just a spike-horn."

For a while now as we rode we kept up a cheerful conversation about elk.
We wondered if we should meet many more close to the trail like this;
but it was not long before our words died away. We had come into a
veritable gulf of mountain peaks, sharp at their bare summits like
teeth, holding fields of snow lower down, and glittering still in full
day up there, while down among our pines and parks the afternoon was
growing sombre. All the while the fresh hoofprints of the horse and the
fresh footprints of the man preceded us. In the trees, and in the opens,
across the levels, and up the steeps, they were there. And so they were
not four hours old! Were they so much? Might we not, round some turn,
come upon the makers of them? I began to watch for this. And again my
brain played me an evil trick, against which I found myself actually
reasoning thus: if they took turns riding, then walking must tire them
as it did me or any man. And besides, there was a horse. With such
thoughts I combated the fancy that those footprints were being made
immediately in front of us all the while, and that they were the only
sign of any presence which our eyes could see. But my fancy overcame my
thoughts. It was shame only which held me from asking this question of
the Virginian: Had one horse served in both cases of Justice down at
the cottonwoods? I wondered about this. One horse--or had the strangling
nooses dragged two saddles empty at the same signal? Most likely; and
therefore these people up here--Was I going back to the nursery? I
brought myself up short. And I told myself to be steady; there lurked in
this brain-process which was going on beneath my reason a threat worse
than the childish apprehensions it created. I reminde