"Did you ever feel kind of sudden like you'd done something before?" Lafe inquired.
It was a month later and we were riding through the dusk up the Cañon towards his home. This was too abstruse.
"I mean," he explained, "sometimes when you're at some place or looking at something, haven't you had a quick idea that you'd done the same thing in the same place a long time ago? Haven't you ever felt that way, Dan?"
"Often."
"I wonder," said he, "what's the reason?"
"It's probably a recurring impression—a remembrance of an act performed years ago."
He shook his head. "No-oo. It ain't that. I ain't never rode up here with you before. This is the first time me and you have been here together, ain't it? Yet I swear it struck me just now that, so long ago I can't call to mind when, me and you were trotting along just like this."
"Perhaps we were chums in a previous existence. There is the transmigration of souls, you know."
Lafe answered impatiently that the phenomenon could not be explained on any such grounds and expressed surprise that a man of my seeming sense would credit such theories. It seemed to rankle in him strangely. He grumbled to himself for a considerable distance, and was so visibly put out that I switched the talk.
"How's Bob getting along?" I ventured.