“Well, I don’t often think hard,” he went on ingenuously. “But I did that time, and it’s queer how easy it is to think right when you really try—hard. Guess you don’t need to think much in your work—but maybe sometimes you’ll have to, and then you’ll find how easy it comes.”
He turned abruptly in the saddle and looked straight into the officer’s interested face. His eyes were alight, and he emitted a deep-throated guffaw.
“Say,” he went on, “it came to me all of a sudden. It was in the middle of the night. I woke up thinking it. I was saying it to myself. Why not go out West? Join Charlie. Put all your money into his ranch. Turn it into a swell affair, and run it together. That way it’ll seem as if you were doing it for yourself. That way Charlie’ll never know you’re handing him a fortune. Can you beat it?” he finished up triumphantly.
Stanley Fyles had not often met men in the course of his sordid work with whom he really wanted to shake hands. But somehow this great, soft-hearted, simple giant made him feel as he had never felt before. He abruptly thrust out a hand, forgetful of the previous handshakes he had endured, and, in a moment, it was seized in a second vice-like grip.
“It’s fine,” he said. Then as an afterthought: “No, you can’t beat it.”
The unconscious Bill beamed his satisfaction.
“That’s how I thought,” he said enthusiastically. “And I’ll be mighty useful to him, myself, too—in a way. Don’t guess I know much about wheat or cattle, but I can ride anything with hair on it, and I’ve never seen the feller I couldn’t pound to a mush with the gloves on. That’s useful, seeing Charlie’s sort of small, and—and mild.” Suddenly he pointed out ahead. “What’s that standing right up there? See, over there. A tree—or—something.”
Fyles abruptly awoke to their whereabouts. Bill Bryant was pointing at the great pine marking Rocky Springs.
“That’s the landmark of Rocky Springs,” he told him. This stranger had so interested and amused him that he had quite lost reckoning of the distance they had ridden together.