He sat down upon the edge of the station platform and thought it out deliberately. Since it would be hours before the tracks could be cleared and the rail journey resumed, what was to prevent him from taking an immediate and delightful plunge into the region of the heart-stirring recollections? Doubtless old Jason Debbleby was at this moment sitting on the door-step of his lonely ranch-house in the Pigskin foot-hills, smoking his corn-cob pipe and, quite possibly, wondering what had become of the boy whom he had taught to "rope down" and saddle and ride. Blount estimated the distance as he remembered it. With a hired horse he might reach Debbleby's by late bedtime; and after a night spent with the old ranchman he could ride on across the big mesa to the capital.
Another ineffectual attempt to find out how soon the relief train from the capital might be expected decided Blount. Arranging with the Pullman conductor to have his hand-luggage left in Gantry's office at the capital, the man in search of his boyhood crossed quickly to a livery-stable opposite the station, bargained for a saddle-horse, borrowed a poncho and a pair of leggings, and prepared to break violently, for the moment at least, with all the civilized traditions. He would go and see Debbleby—drop in upon the old horse-breeder without warning, and thus get his first revivified impression of the homeland unmixed with any of the disappointing changes which were doubtless awaiting him at the real journey's end.
Now it chanced that the livery-stable was an adjunct to the single hotel in the small sawmill town, and as Blount was mounting to ride he saw the thin-faced man, whom the ranchman, Griggs, had named for him, standing on the porch of the hotel in earnest talk with three others who, from their appearance, might have figured either as "timber jacks" or cowboys. Blount was on the point of recognizing his companion of the Pullman smoking-compartment as he rode past the hotel to take the trail to the northward, but a curious conviction that the gentleman with the bird-of-prey eyes was making him the subject of the earnest talk with the three men of doubtful occupation restrained him. A moment later, when he looked back from the crossing of the railroad track, he saw that all four of the men on the porch were watching him. This he saw; and if the backward glance had been prolonged for a single instant he might also have seen a big, barrel-bodied man with a red face stumbling out of the side door of the shack hotel to make vigorous and commanding signals to stop him. But this he missed.
There was an excuse for the oversight as well as for the speedy blotting out of the picture of the four men watching him from the porch of the hotel. With a fairly good horse under him, with the squeak of the saddle-leather in his ears and the smell of it in his nostrils, and with the wide world of the immensities into which to ride unhampered and free, the lost boyhood was found. Not for the most soul-satisfying professional triumph the fettered East could offer him would he have curtailed the free-reined flight into the silent wilderness by a single mile.
For the first half-hour of the invigorating gallop the fugitive from civilization had the sunset glow to help him find the trail. After that the moon rose, and the landmarks, which had seemed more or less familiar in daylight, lost their remembered featurings. During the first few miles the trail had led broadly across the table-land, with the eastern mountains withdrawing and the Lost River Range looming larger as its lofty sky-line was struck out sharply against the sunset horizon. Farther on, in the transition darkness between sunset and moonrise, the trail disappeared entirely; but so long as he was sure of the general direction, Blount held on and gave the tireless little bronco a loose rein. The Debbleby ranch lay among the farther foot-hills of the western range, with the broad gulch of the Pigskin cutting a plain highway through the mountains. If he could find one of the head-water streams of the Pigskin, all of which took their rise in the gulches of the mesa, there could be no danger of losing the way.
It was some little time after he had left the shoulderings of the eastern range behind that a singular thing happened. Far away on his right he heard the sound of galloping hoofs. Though the moon was nearly full and the treeless landscape was bare of any kind of cover, he could not make out the horseman who was evidently passing him and going in the same direction. At first he thought it was some one who was making a détour to avoid him. Then he smiled at the absurdity of the guess and concluded that he himself was off the trail. This conclusion was confirmed a little later when two other travellers, announcing themselves to the ear as the first one had, and also, like the first, invisible to the sharpest eye-sweep of the moonlit plain, passed him at speed.
After that Blount had the solitudes and vastnesses to himself, and it was not until after the mesa-land had been crossed without a sign of a water-leading gulch to guide him to the Pigskin, and the bronco was patiently picking its way through the hogback of the western range, that the boyish thing he had been led to do took shape as an adventure which might have discomforting consequences.
For, after the hired bronco had wandered aimlessly through many gulches and had climbed a good half-score of the hogback hills, the young man from the East admitted that the boyhood memories were hopelessly and altogether at fault in the deceptive moonlight. Blount gave the horse a breathing halt on one of the hogbacks and tried to reconstruct the puzzling hills into some featuring that he could remember. The effort was fruitless. He was very thoroughly and painstakingly lost.