"Don't you go to wandering about here or you'll get plumb lost."
Stamford cast a furtive eye back on the sixty miles and shuddered. Almost at daylight—and that meant about two-thirty a.m.—they had pulled out of Medicine Hat, for he was determined to run no risk of a night in the open. One he had had already, and was content. That sixty miles of prairie hung behind him like a pall, too oppressive to be relieved by its varied monotony. Here a line of unaccountable sand-buttes, there a landscape of rolling sweeps like the billows of a petrified sea, and sometimes a stretch of dullness that melted into the horizon uncountable miles away; and over all but the sand-buttes dead whispering grass, trembling in the blazing winds of midsummer, and a lifelessness that was uncanny.
His nerves were jangling still from the memory of it and, delighted though he was at the end of his journey, sundry and impressive qualms that resembled fear made him question his ability to cope with the problem he had set himself.
He raised himself on his arms before the house and tentatively extended one dead foot, drew in his breath painfully, and held himself erect by the buggy as both feet touched the ground.
"There are the stables, I guess," he pointed out. "I confess I don't know the proper thing to do with you. Will they feed you there or here in the ranch-house?"
The driver gathered up the reins.
"They ain't going to have a chance to keep me neither places. I'm not taking chances where Two-Gun Dakota is—me with no gun or nothing. These broncs are good for another ten miles. I got a friend over at the Double Bar-O. That's good enough for me."
He tumbled Stamford's suitcase out, chirruped to the horses, and rattled away eastward up the slope.
Stamford was suddenly oppressed with the loneliness of things. About the ranch-house was not a sign of life, and the ranch buildings two hundred yards away seemed to be equally deserted. He glanced hurriedly about and launched himself on the noisy gravel walk to the door. He was thrilled with the vastness of things, the tremendous silence, the frowning cliffs across the river, the pettiness of mere man; the gravel crunched pleasantly under him as he walked.
Receiving no reply to his persistent knocking, he lifted the latch. The evidences of recent life within pleased him mightily, especially the signs of a woman's presence. Mary Aikens' darning lay on the table where she had dropped it. A pile of folded newspapers and magazines covered the top of a smaller table against the wall, almost crowding off a smoker's tray and pipestand. The pictures on the walls, the shiny stove, the cushions piled with attractive abandon on couch and chairs, and, above all, a piano—Stamford felt his spirits rise.