“Can she make a punkin pie, Billy boy, Billy boy,
     Can she make a punkin pie, charming Billy? 
       She can make a punkin pie
       Quick’s a cat can wink her eye—­”

Out ahead, where the trail wound aimlessly around a low sand ridge flecked with scrubby sage half buried in gray snowbanks, a horse whinnied inquiringly; Barney, his own red-roan, perked his ears toward the sound and sent shrill answer.  In that land and at that season travelers were never so numerous as to be met with indifference, and Billy felt a slight thrill of expectation.  All day—­or as much of it as was left after his late sleeping and later breakfast—­he had ridden without meeting a soul; now he unconsciously pressed lightly with his spurs to meet the comer.

Around the first bend they went, and the trail was blank before them.  “Thought it sounded close,” Billy muttered, “but with the wind where it is and the air like this, sound travels farther.  I wonder—­”

Past the point before them poked a black head, followed slowly by a shambling horse whose dragging hoofs proclaimed his weariness and utter lack of ambition.  The rider, Billy decided after one sharp glance, he had never seen before in his life—­and nothing lost by it, either, he finished mentally when he came closer.

If the riders had not willed it so the horses would mutually have agreed to stop when they met; that being the way of range horses after carrying speech-hungry men for a season or two.  If men meet out there in the land of far horizons and do not stop for a word or two, it is generally because there is bad feeling between them; and horses learn quickly the ways of their masters.

“Hello,” greeted Billy tentatively, eying the other measuringly because he was a stranger.  “Pretty soft going, ain’t it?” He referred to the half-thawed trail.

“Ye-es,” hesitated the other, glancing diffidently down at the trail and then up at the neighboring line of disconsolate, low hills.  “Ye-es, it is.”  His eyes came back and met Billy’s deprecatingly, almost like those of a woman who feels that her youth and her charm have slipped behind her and who does not quite know whether she may still be worthy your attention.  “Are you acquainted with this—­this part of the country?”

“Well,” Billy had got out his smoking material, from force of the habit with which a range-rider seizes every opportunity for a smoke, and singled meditatively a leaf.  “Well, I kinda know it by sight, all right.”  And in his voice lurked a pride of knowledge inexplicable to one who has not known and loved the range-land.  “I guess you’d have some trouble finding a square foot of it that I ain’t been over,” he added, mildly boastful.

If one might judge anything from a face as blank as that of a china doll, both the pride and the boastfulness were quite lost upon the stranger.  Only his eyes were wistfully melancholy.

“My name is Alexander P. Dill,” he informed Billy quite unnecessarily.  “I was going to the Murton place.  They told me it was only ten miles from town and it seems as though I must have taken the wrong road, somehow.  Could you tell me about where it would be from here?”