his coffee and
pancakes scalding hot, saddled his horse, and rode away, leaving the
cook to straighten affairs in the dugout; and all the while it seemed to
him that he hadn't had any breakfast at all. He couldn't see anything of
the cattle; but Mr. Parsons put his horse into a lope and proceeded to
fill his pipe as he went.

"I suppose you know your cattle have gone this way, don't you?" said
Tom.

"Of course I do," answered Mr. Parsons, taking a long pull at his pipe
to make sure it was well lighted. "They are ten miles on the way nearer
home than we are, and we have got to make that up."

"Do you always drive your cattle into the mountains in winter?"

"Yes, sir. We have had some blizzards here that would make your eyes
bung out if you could have seen them, and I would be penniless to-day if
my cattle had been caught in them. Some of the cattle ahead of us have
been driven forty miles by a blizzard that struck us last fall, and I
have just succeeded in finding them. If my neighbor hadn't been as
honest as they make them, I wouldn't have got them at all. It would be
very easy for him to round them up and brand them over again, and then
tell me that if I could find an arrow brand in his herd I could have
them."

"How far does your nearest neighbor live from you?"

"Just a jump--fifteen or twenty miles, maybe."

Fifteen or twenty miles! None nearer than that! Tom had found out by
experience that distances didn't count for anything on the prairie.

"You said last night, in speaking of your gold find, that, unfortunately
for you, you got it," Tom reminded him. "I would like to know what you
meant by that. Were you cheated out of it?"

Mr. Parsons replied, with a laugh, that he was not cheated out of it,
but, on the whole, it didn't much matter. He took a party of experts up
there, and, after working over the mine for a week or more, they gave
him twenty thousand dollars for it, of which five thousand went to him
and the balance to his employer. That made him lazy--too lazy to go to
work. He spent three thousand dollars in grub-staking men to look up
claims for him until the end of the year, when he found out that he
wasn't making anything by it, so he took the balance of his money and
went into the cattle business.

"That gave me my start," said Mr. Parsons in conclusion. "In four years
I had made up the money I had spent, and vowed I never would go into it
again; but here I am talking of sending you to the mo