He made Shoop’s cabin his headquarters, and spent his spare time cording wood.  He liked his occupation, and felt rather independent with the comfortable cabin, a good supply of food, a corral and pasture for the ponies, plenty of clear, cold water, and a hundred trails to ride each day from dawn to dark as he should choose.  Once unfamiliar with the timber country, he grew to love the twinkling gold of the aspens, the twilight vistas of the spruce and pines, and the mighty sweep of the great purple tides of forest that rolled down from the ranges into a sheer of space that had no boundary save the sky.

He grew a trifle thinner in the high country.  The desert tan of his cheeks and throat deepened to a ruddy bronze.

Aside from pride in his work, he took special pride in his equipment, keeping his bits and conchas polished and his leather gear oiled.  Reluctantly he discarded his chaps.  He found that they hindered him when working on foot.  Only when he rode into Jason for supplies did he wear his chaps, a bit of cowboy vanity quite pardonable in his years.

If he ever thought of women at all, it was when he lounged and smoked by the evening fire in the cabin, sometimes recalling “that Eastern girl with the jim-dandy mother.”  He wondered if they ever thought of him, and he wished that they might know he was now a full-fledged ranger with man-size responsibilities.  “And mebby they think I’m ridin’ south yet,” he would say to himself.  “I must have looked like I didn’t aim to pull up this side of Texas, from the way I lit out.”  But, then, women didn’t understand such things.

Occasionally he confided something of the kind to the spluttering fire, laughing as he recalled the leg of lamb with which he had waved his hasty farewell.

“And I was scared, all right.  But I wasn’t so scared I forgot I’d get hungry.”  Which conclusion seemed to satisfy him.

When he learned that a writer had leased five acres next to Bud’s cabin, he was skeptical as to how he would get along with “strangers.”  He liked elbow-room.  Yet, on second thought, it would make no difference to him.  He would not be at the cabin often nor long at a time.  The evenings were lonely sometimes.

But when camped at the edge of the timber on some mountain meadow, with his ponies grazing in the starlit dusk, when the little, leaping flame of his night fire flung ruddy shadows that danced in giant mimicry in the cavernous arches of the pines; when the faint tinkle of the belled pack-horse rang a faery cadence in the distance; then there was no such thing as loneliness in his big, outdoor world.  Rather, he was content in a solid way.  An inner glow of satisfaction because of work well done, a sense of well-being, founded upon perfect physical health and ease, kept him from feeling the need of companionship other than that of his horses.  Sometimes he sat late into the night watching the pine gum ooze from a burning log and swell to golden bubbles that puffed into tiny flames and vanished in smoky whisperings.  At such times a companion would not have been unwelcome, yet he was content to be alone.