I didn't hear the two horses come, but there's a young person behind me sort of attracting attention. When he moves there's a tinkle of iron, creaking leather, horsy smell, too, and presently he sets down along of me, cross-legged. I shoved him the peanuts, but he lit a cigarette, offering me one. Though he wasn't, he just felt same as a seafaring man, so I didn't mind him being there.
"The ocean," says he, "is it allus like that?"
"'Cept when there's weather."
"That's a ship?"
"Was."
"Dead?"
"Dead."
He wanted to look at my sheath knife, and when I handed it he seen the lettering "Green River" on the blade. He'd been along Green River and there's no knives like that.
Then I'd got to know about them iron things on his heels—spurs. We threw peanuts, my knife agin his spurs, and he won easy. Queer how all the time he's wanting to show himself off. He'd never seen salt water before. The shipping, making the port, or clearing, foreign or coastwise, the Hellafloat Yank, the Skowogian Coffin, the family packet, liner, tramp, fisher, lumberman, geordie and greaser was all the same to him. "Sounds like injun languages," says he, "can't you talk white?" So we went in swimming, and afterward there's a lunch he'd got with him—quart of pickled onions, and cigarettes. Seems it's the vacuum in under which makes hearts feel so heavy.
This stranger begins to throw me horse talk and cow stories. It seems cow-punchers is sort of sailors of the plains, only it's different. Seafaring men gets wet and cold, and wrecked, but cow-boys has adventures instead, excitement, red streaks of life. Following the sea, I been missing life. Why, this guy ain't more'n two years older'n me—say, seventeen, but he's had five years ridin' for one man, four years for another, six years in Arizona, then three in Oregon, until he's added up about half a century. He's more worldly, too, than me—been in a train on the railroad. I'm surely humbled by four P. M., and if he keeps goin', by four bells I'll be young enough to set in mother's lap.