e second summer of it--I had
come to understand him enough to know that he was unfathomable. Still,
for a moment it crossed my thoughts that perhaps now he was discoursing
about himself. He had allowed a jealous foreman to fall out with him at
Sunk Creek ranch in the spring, during Judge Henry's absence. The man,
having a brief authority, parted with him. The Southerner had chosen
that this should be the means of ultimately getting the foreman
dismissed and himself recalled. It was strategic. As he put it to me:
"When I am gone, it will be right easy for the Judge to see which of
us two he wants. And I'll not have done any talking." All of which duly
befell in the autumn as he had planned: the foreman was sent off,
his assistant promoted, and the Virginian again hired. But this was
meanwhile. He was indulging himself in a several months' drifting, and
while thus drifting he had written to me. That is how we two came to be
on our way from the railroad to hunt the elk and the mountain-sheep,
and were pausing to fish where Buffalo Fork joins its waters with Snake
River. In those days the antelope still ran there in hundreds, the
Yellowstone Park was a new thing, and mankind lived very far away. Since
meeting me with the horses in Idaho the Virginian had been silent, even
for him. So now I stood casting my fly, and trusting that he was not
troubled with second thoughts over his strategy.

"Have yu' studded much about marriage?" he now inquired. His serious
eyes met mine as he lay stretched along the ground.

"Not much," I said; "not very much."

"Let's swim," he said. "They have changed their minds."

Forthwith we shook off our boots and dropped our few clothes, and
heedless of what fish we might now drive away, we went into the cool,
slow, deep breadth of backwater which the bend makes just there. As
he came up near me, shaking his head of black hair, the cowpuncher was
smiling a little.

"Not that any number of baths," he remarked, "would conceal a man's
objectionableness from an antelope--not even a she-one."

Then he went under water, and came up again a long way off.

We dried before the fire, without haste. To need no clothes is better
than purple and fine linen. Then he tossed the flap-jacks, and I served
the trout, and after this we lay on our backs upon a buffalo-hide to
smoke and watch the Tetons grow more solemn, as the large stars opened
out over the sky.

"I don't care if I never go home," said I.

T