But if we had wandered momentarily, as if out of some quiet sunlit gallery of Monte Beni, I soon found it was into the frontier of our western border.  A herd of Texas ponies were to be immediately on sale, and I went to see them—­wild animals, beautiful in their wildness, who had never known bit or spur; they were lariated and thrown down, as the buyers picked them out, and then led and pulled away to man’s life.  It was a typical scene:  the pen, the hundred ponies bunched together and startled with the new surroundings, the cowboys whose resolute habit sat on them like cotillion grace—­athletes in the grain—­with the gray, close garb for use, the cigarette like a slow spark under the broad sombrero, the belted revolver, the lasso hung loose-coiled in the hand, quiet, careless, confident, with the ease of the master in his craft, now pulling down a pony without a struggle, and now showing strength and dexterity against frightened resistance; but the hour sped on, and our spoil was two of these creatures, so attractive to me at least that every moment my friend’s eye was on me, and he kept saying, “They’re wild, mind!” The next morning in the dark dawn we had them in harness, and drove out, when the stars were scarce gone from the sky, due north to the Bad Lands, to give me a new experience of the vast American land that bore us both, and made us, despite the thousands of miles that stretched between ocean and prairie, brothers in blood and brain,—­brothers and friends.

Yet how to tell that ride, now grown a shining leaf of my book of memory! for my eyes were fascinated with the land, in the high blowing August wind, full of coolness and upland strength, like new breath in my nostrils; and forward over the broken country, fenceless, illimitable, ran the brown road, like a ploughed ribbon of soil, into the distance, where pioneer and explorer and prospector had gone before, and now the farmer was thinly settling,—­the new America growing up before my eyes! and him only by me to make me not a stranger there, with talk of absent friends and old times, though scarce the long age of a college course had gone by,—­talk lapsing as of old on such rides into serious strains, problems such as the young talk of together and keep their secret, learning life,—­the troubles of the heart of youth.  And if now I recur to some of the themes we touched on, and set down these memoranda, fragments of life, thinking they may be of use to other youths as they were then to us, I trust they will lose no privacy; for, as I write, I see them in that place, with that noble prospect, that high sky, and him beside me whose young listening yet seems to woo them from my breast.