“H-m-m!  They stopped at the hotel to-night—­Bridgers, I mean.  Drove in after dark from the ranch.  They mean to catch the noon train from Tower to-morrow, Bridger told me.  It will be an immense benefit, William, when those big through-trains get to running through Hardup.  There is some talk among the powers-that-be of making this a division point.  It will develop the country wonderfully.  I really feel tempted to cut down my investment in a store for the present, and buy more land.  What do you think, William?”

“Oh, I dunno,” said Billy in a let-me-alone kind of tone.

“Well, it’s very late.  Everybody who lays any claim to respectability should be in his bed,” Dill remarked placidly.  “You say you start at sunrise?  H-m-m!  You will have to call me so that I can go over to the hotel and get the money to refund what you used of your own.  I left my cash in the hotel safe.  But they will be stirring early—­they will have to get the Bridgers off, you know.”

It was Dill who lay and smiled quizzically into the dark and listened to the wide-awake breathing of the man beside him—­breathing which betrayed deep emotion held rigidly in check so far as outward movement went.  He fell asleep knowing well that the other was lying there wide-eyed and would probably stay so until day.  He had had a hard day and had done many things, but what he had done last pleased him best.

Now this is a bald, unpolished record of the morning:  Billy saw the dawn come, and rose in the perfect silence he had learned from years of sleeping in a tent with tired men, and of having to get up at all hours and take his turn at night-guarding; for tired, sleeping cowboys do not like to be disturbed unnecessarily, and so they one and all learn speedily the Golden Rule and how to apply it.  That is why Dill, always a light sleeper, did not hear Billy go out.

Billy did not quite know what he was going to do, but habit bade him first feed and water his horse.  After that—­well, he did not know.  Dill might not have things straight, or he might just be trying to jolly him up a little, or he might be a meddlesome old granny-gossip.  What had looked dear and straight, say at three o’clock in the morning, was at day-dawn hazy with doubt.  So he led Barney down to the creek behind the hotel, where in that primitive little place they watered their horses.

The sun was rising redly, and the hurrying ripples were all tipped with gold, and the sky above a bewildering, tumbled fabric of barbaric coloring.  Would the sun rise like that in New Mexico?  Billy wondered, and watched the coming of his last day here, where he had lived, had loved, had dreamed dreams and builded castles—­and had seen the dreams change to bitterness, and the castles go toppling to ruins.  He would like to stay with Dill, for he had grown fond of the lank, whimsical man who was like no one Billy had ever known.  He would have stayed even in the face of the change that had come to the range-land—­but he could not bear to see the familiar line of low hills which marked the Double-Crank and, farther down, the line-camp, and know that Flora was gone quite away from him into the North.