He took only a flying camp with him, travelling in the lightest kind of order, camping often with the cattlemen he ran across.
One night, away down in the Panhandle, they fell in with an outfit driving a bunch of steers up the Yellow Grass trail. Blair noted that the foreman was a character. A man of few words, but of great muscular strength; and, moreover, frightfully scarred.
He was silent and inclined to be morose at first, but after he learned Blair was from McCloud he unbent a bit, and after a time began asking questions which indicated a surprising familiarity with the northern country and with our road. In particular, this man asked what had become of Bucks, and, when told what a big railroad man he had grown, asserted, with a sudden bitterness and without in any way leading up to it, that with Bucks on the West End there never would have been a strike.
Sitting at their camp-fire while their crews mingled, Blair noticed in the flicker of the blaze how seamed the throat and breast of the cattleman were; even his sinewy forearms were drawn out of shape. He asked, too, whether Blair recollected the night the barracks burned; but Blair at that time was east of the river, and so explained, though he related to the cowboy incidents of the fire which he had heard, among others the story of Fitzpatrick and Siclone Clark.
"And Fitzpatrick is alive and Siclone is dead," said Blair, in conclusion. But the cowboy disputed him.
"You mean Clark is alive and Fitzpatrick is dead," said he.
"No," contended Sidney, "Fitzpatrick is running an engine up there now. I saw him within three months." But the cowboy was loath to conviction.
Next morning their trails forked. The foreman seemed disinclined to part from the surveyors, and while the bunch was starting he rode a long way with Blair, talking in a random way. Then, suddenly wheeling, he waved a good-bye with his heavy Stetson and, galloping hard, was soon lost to the north in the ruts of the Yellow Grass.
When Blair came in he told Neighbor and me about it. Blair had never seen Siclone Clark, and so was no judge as to his identity; but Neighbor believes yet that Blair camped that night way down in the Panhandle with no other than the cowboy engineer.
Once again, that only two years ago, something came back to us.