They finished their meal in silence, for they had come to an understanding. The afternoon was too short and cold for real estate business to be brisk, and nobody in Carey’s Crossing noted that the front window of Darley Champer’s little office was covered with a newspaper blind all the rest of that day, nor did anybody pay attention to the whereabouts of the stranger—Mr. Thomas Smith, of Wilmington, Delaware—during this same time. Nobody, except John Jacobs, of the Jacobs House, who gained his knowledge mostly by instinct; never, at least, by rude inquiry. He had been up on the roof helping Bo Peep to fasten the sign over the door which the wind had torn 64 loose. From this place he could see above the newspaper screen of the window across the street that Champers and Smith were in a tremendously earnest consultation. He would have thought nothing of it had not Champers chanced to sight him on the roof and immediately readjusted the newspaper blind to prevent observation.
“I’ll offer to sell Darley a window shade cheap tomorrow and see how he bites,” and the little Jewish merchant smiled shrewdly at the thought.
Out on the trail that day the snow lay deeper to the westward, hiding the wagon ruts. The dead sunflower stalks made only a faint black edging along the white monotony of the way and sometimes on bleak swells there were no markings at all. Some distance from Carey’s Crossing a much heavier snowfall, covering a wide swath, under which the trails were entirely lost, had wandered in zigzag lines down from the northwest.
In the early afternoon Dr. Horace Carey had started west on the surest horse in the Stewart-Jacobs livery stable, taking his old-fashioned saddle-bags with him through force of habit, and by mid-afternoon was floundering in the edge of this deeper snowfall.
Nature must have meant Horace Carey for the plains. He was of medium height, compactly built, without an ounce of unnecessary weight. The well-rounded form took away all hint of spareness, while it did not destroy the promise of endurance. His heavy, dark hair and dark gray eyes, his straight nose and firm mouth under a dark mustache, and his well-set chin made up an attractive but not handsome face. The magnetism of his personality was not 65 in manly beauty. It was an inborn gift and would have characterized him in any condition in life. There was about him a genial dignity that made men look up to him and a willingness to serve that made selfishness seem mean. He could not have been thirty, although he had been on the plains for five years. The West was people by young men. It’s need for daring spirits found less response in men of maturer life. But the West had most need for humane men. The bully, the dare-devil, the brutal, and the selfish were refuse before the force that swept the frontier onward; but they were never elements in real state building. Before such men as Carey they lost power.
The doctor rode away toward the west, bowing his head before the strong wind that he knew too well to fear, yet wondering as he rode if he had done wisely to dare the deepening snow of the buried trail.
“I might have waited a day, anyhow,” he thought. “It’s a devil of a ride over to Jim Shirley’s, and we got only the tag ends of that storm down at the Crossing from the looks of this. However, I may as well keep at it now.”
He surged on for a few miles without any signs of an open trail appearing. Then he dropped to a slow canter.
“I’d better get this worry straightened and my mind untangled if I am to have any comfort on this ride,” he said aloud, as was his wont to do when out in the open alone. “Everything happens to a man who gives too much leeway to that indefinite inside guide saying, ‘Do this! Let that alone!’ And yet that guide hasn’t failed me when I’ve listened to it.”