Slipping softly to their respective bunks, the boys peeled and climbed into their blankets. And there they all lay, wide-awake but silent, for an hour or two, some watching Circuit curiously, some enviously, others staring fixedly into the dying fire until from its dull-glowing embers there rose for some visions of bare-footed, nut-brown, fustian-clad maids, and for others the finer lines of silk and lace draped figures, now long since passed forever out of their lives. Those longest awake were privileged to witness Circuit's final offering at the shrine of his love.
His letter finished, enclosed, addressed, and stamped, he kissed it and laid it aside, apparently all unconscious of the presence of his mates, as he had been since beginning his letter. Then he drew from beneath his shirt something none of them had seen before, a buckskin bag, out of which he pulled a fat blank memorandum book, into which he proceeded to copy, in as small a hand as he could write, every line of his sweetheart's letters. Later they learned that this bag and its contents never left Circuit's body, nestled always over his heart, suspended by a buckskin thong!
Out of the close intimacies cow-camp life promotes, it was not long before the well-nigh overmastering curiosity of the outfit was satisfied. They learned how the "little ol' blue-eyed sorrel top," as Bill Ball had christened her, had vowed to wait faithfully till Circuit could earn and save enough to make them a home, and how Circuit had sworn to look into no woman's eyes till he could again look into hers. Before many months had passed, Circuit's regular weekly letter to Netty—regular when on the ranch—and the ceremonial purification and personal decking that preceded it, had become for the Cross Cañon outfit a public ceremony all studiously observed. None were ever too tired, none too grumpy, to wash, shave, and "slick up" of letter nights, scrupulously as Moslems bathe their feet before approaching the shrine of Mahomet and still as Moslems before their shrine all sat about the bunk-room while Circuit wrote his letter and copied Netty's last. Indeed, more than one well-started wild town orgy was stopped short by one of the boys remarking: "Cut it, you kiyotes! Netty wouldn't like it!"
And thus the months rolled on till they stacked up into years, but the interchange of letters never ceased and the burden of Circuit's buckskin bag grew heavier.
Twice Circuit ventured a financial coup, and both times lost—invested his savings in horses, losing one band to Arizona rustlers, and the other to Mancos Jim's Pah-Utes. After the last experience he took no further chances and settled down to the slow but sure plan of hoarding his wages.
Come the Fall of the eighth year of his exile from Netty, Circuit had accumulated two thousand dollars, and it was unanimously voted by the Cross Cañon outfit, gathered in solemn conclave at Circuit's request, that he might venture to return to claim her. And before the conclave was adjourned, Lee Skeats, the chairman, remarked: "Circuit, ef Netty shows airy sign o' balkin' at th' size o' your bank roll, you kin jes' tell her that thar 's a bunch out here in Cross Cañon that's been lovin' her sort o' by proxy, that'll chip into your matrimonial play, plumb double the size o' your stack, jest fo' th' hono' o' meetin' up wi' her an' th' pleasure o' seein' their pardner hitched."
The season's work done and the herd turned loose on its Winter range on the San Juan, the outfit decided to escort Circuit into Mancos and there celebrate his coming nuptials. For them the one hundred and seventy intervening miles of alternating cañon and mesa, much of the journey over trails deadly dangerous for any creature less sure-footed than a goat, was no more than a pleasant pasear. Thus it was barely high noon of the third day when the thirty Cross Cañonites reached their destination.
Deep down in a mighty gorge, nestled beside the stream that gave its name alike to cañon and to town, Mancos stewed contentedly in a temperature that would try the strength and temper of any unaccustomed to the climate of southwestern Colorado. Framed in Franciscan-gray sage brush, itself gray as the sage with the dust of pounding hoofs and rushing whirlwinds, at a little distance Mancos looked like an aggregation of dead ash heaps, save where, here and there, dabs of faded paint lent a semblance of patches of dying embers.
While raw, uninviting, and even melancholy in its every aspect, for the scattered denizens of a vast region round about Mancos's principal street was the local Great White Way that furnished all the fun and frolic most of them ever knew. To it flocked miners from their dusky, pine-clad gorges in the north, grangers from the then new farming settlement in the Montezuma Valley, cowboys from Blue Mountain, the Dolores, and the San Juan; Navajos from Chillili, Utes from their reservation—a motley lot burning with untamed elemental passions that called for pleasure "straight."
Joyously descending upon the town at a breakneck lope before a following high wind that completely shrouded them in clouds of dust, it was not until they pulled up before their favorite feed corral that the outfit learned that Mancos was revelling in quite the reddest red-letter day of its existence, the day of its first visitation by a circus—and also its last for many a year thereafter.