“Got it? No, not much he didn’t, sonny! He drew just ten, and he was lucky to get that. I’ve done a favor or two for that feller, first and last, and to have him shoot at me made me sore—although he missed me by several locations, I’ll say that for him—so I gave him the ten and told him I’d kick the hump on his back so high up on his shoulders he could wear it for a hat, if he ever shoved into my daylight again. And you never in your life saw a humpback make better time than he did.
“Well here’s for your jack-ass—which way’s the herd?”
Jim sat patiently on the sack until Bud returned with the burro.
“Here’s your thoroughbred!” holloed Bud. “Get ap, there, Mary. Look at the knowing ears of him, will you? You bet cher life, you’ve got an animile there that’ll go when he gets ready, and as fast as he pretty well damn pleases—nail him!”
Jim tied a gunny sack on his noble mount, and the two rode on together to the fork in the trail. Jim tried to thank his friend, who knocked his hat over his eyes, and said, “Aw, write it down when you’ve got more time. Never see a feller in my life I cottoned to more’n you, Jim. First I thought you was too smooth for my kind of traveling, but later, I see it was only the grain of the wood. I believe in my friends, I do. Here we go hopping around this little world for a small time, and then that’s done. S’pose you ain’t got any real friends for the trip? Rotten, I say. You go ahead and rip Plattsburg up the back. Wisht I could be there with you. Don’t you mind consequences. So long, old man! Hike! You beggar!” The buckskin pony was off with a snort and a splashing of gravel as the irons touched his sides, and Bud vanished down the road without a look behind him.
The next day Jim was in Plattsburg. One does not know what an alluring quality, what a hazy enchantment can linger around even a small town, until an absence in a real wilderness has given man’s work a new flavor.
The people coming and going, the traffic of the stores, the dwellings with small cultivated plots around them warmed Jim like a fire. He had been very lonely, without knowing it. In the afternoon he went down to the depot to see the eastern train come in.
Here again absence played a part, and restored the locomotive to its proper proportions of a miracle.
As the engine glided in, shaking the ground beneath it, it seemed impossible to Jim that man really made it. What! Bend those mighty rods of steel to his will? Twist and shape those others? Cast those great drivers? And after, to drive the monster with a hand?