On we went across the prairies of the Dakotas—and the journey was not interesting. It was all dun and dull and brown and monotonous in that late March. When the sun shone it only showed up more of the raw country. Every little while we went plunging through a snow-squall which plastered the car windows and speckled the brown of the prairie.
Then the doldrums got me! All at once I found myself bluer than the old judge had been, even in his deepest despondency. This was a reckless escapade, not a sensible man’s project! I had bragged and blustered and made promises there in that little tin dipper of a Levant where the horizon was pinched in by Mitchell’s Mountain and Tumbledick Hill. I had got by with my bluff in the wood-lot game and had felt as if I were a big man!
But out there!
No longer was it a string of mere names and a smudge of color on paper to make a map! I was looking out, hour by hour, on the reality of the vastness of the great West. As to the men I was hunting for in that wide expanse—those fly-by-nighters, those human skip-bugs—would they not be dodging where impulse took them? Jeff Dawlin was a mere gambler—willing to take a chance on anything. Had he not taken a mere gambler’s chance on my finding those men? If I succeeded he would get his pay. If I did not succeed it was only my failure—he had invested nothing—he had no interest in my affairs, except a gambler’s.
And what could I do to those men if I did find them? They were at home out there—as much at home as they were in the East. The farther out on those prairies I rolled, the farther away from all confidence in myself I seemed to be. Old Ariock Blake used to say that sometimes he felt as if he were “forty miles from water and a hundred miles from land.” I felt just as helplessly up in the air as that! I fairly wallowed in sloppy gloom.
To sit there in front of Zebulon Kingsley in my state of mind and courage and look on his gad-awful sourness of visage was too much for my nerves.
I went to get a drink of water and heard men laughing in the smoking-room. If there were men in the world who could laugh I wanted to be with them. So I went in. They were playing poker, and after a time one man had to leave the train and they asked me into the game.
I was desperate enough to grab at anything that would take my mind off my troubles, so I began to play poker. And when a man sits in to play poker with strangers it’s a mighty small slice of mind he has left to blotter worry with.
I was away from the judge a long time, and he came hunting me up and caught me at the pastime. Perhaps he feared that his two-legged bank had fallen off the train and he had been worrying; but when he saw me with cards in my hand and money spread out he had a lot more to worry about and his face showed it. He let out of him a sort of moan and went away.
“Your father?” asked one of the men, casually. “Sick?”