e could get no more
than single-syllabled replies to his monologue of Job's comfortings.

The returning route was a detour, winding, through the greater part of
it, among and over the swelling heights north of the Pannikin. On each
hilltop the vast sweep of the inter-mountain wilderness came into view,
and from the highest point in the trail, reached when the sun was
dipping toward the western horizon, the eye-sweep took in the broken
country lying between the Pannikin and the path of the Transcontinental
narrow gauge forty miles away.

Jack's Canyon, the Transcontinental station nearest Copah, was the
beginning of a combined pack trail and stage road connecting the Copah
district with what had been, before the advent of the Southwestern
Extension, its nearest railroad outlet. Along this trail, visible to the
buckboarders as a black speck tittuping against the reddening background
of the west, galloped a solitary horseman, urging his mount in a way to
make Frisbie, getting his glimpse from the hilltop of extended views,
call Ford's attention.

"Look at that brute, pushing his horse like that at the end of the day!
He ought to be--"

But the hastening rider was getting his deserts, whatever they should
be, as he went along. For three hours, with three relays of fresh horses
picked up at the stage stations in passing, he had been galloping
southward, and to whatever other urging he might confess was added the
new one of fear, the fear that in the approaching day's-end he would
lose his way.

Seen from the nearer point of view, the tittuping horseman seemed
curiously out of harmony with his environment. Instead of the cow-boy
"shaps," or overalls, he wore the trousers of civilization, which the
rapid night had hitched half-way to his knees. In place of the
open-breasted shirt with the rolled-up sleeves there were tailor-made
upper clothes, with the collar and cravat also of civilization, and the
hat--it was perhaps fortunate for the rider that he had not met any true
denizens of the unfettered highlands on the lonely trail from Jack's
Canyon. His hat was a Derby of the newest shape; and the cow-men beyond
the range are impatient of such head-gear.

Recognition, after one has ridden hard for three hours over a dusty
road, is not easy; but there are faces one never forgets, and the
features, dust-grimed and sweat-streaked though they were, had still the
South-of-Europe outline, the slightly aquiline nose, and the pier