the improvements is worth a little something, and the money’d come handy right now, helpin’ me into something here.  There’s a chance to buy into a nice little service station, fellow calls it—­where automobiles stop to git pumped up with air and gasoline and stuff.  If I can sell my improvements, I’ll buy in there.  Looks foolish to go back, once I made up my mind to quit.”

He ate while he talked, and he talked because he had the simple mind of a child and must think out loud in order to be perfectly at ease.  He had that hunger for speech which comes sometimes to men who have lived far from their kind.  Peter listened to him vaguely at first; then avidly, with an inner excitement which his mild, expressionless face hid like a mask.

“I was getting kinda discouraged when my horse up ’n died,” the eater went on.  “And then when some durn greaser went ’n stole my burro, I jest up ’n sold my saddle and a few head uh sheep I had, and pulled out.  New Mexico ranching is all right for them that likes it, but excuse me!  I want to live where I can see a movie once in a while, anyhow.”  He stopped for the simple, primitive reason that he had filled his mouth to overflowing with food, so that speech was for the moment a physical impossibility.

Peter sipped his glass of milk, and his thoughts raced back and forth between the door of opportunity that stood ajar, and the mountain of difficulty which he must somehow move by his mental strength alone before he and his might pass through that door.

“Ah—­how much do you value your improvements at?” he asked.  His emotion was so great that his voice refused to carry it, and so was flat and as expressionless as his commonplace face.

“Well,” gurgled the young man, sluicing down his food with coffee, “it’s pretty hard to figure exactly.  I’ve got a good little shack, you see, and there’s a spring right close handy by.  Springs is sure worth money in that country, water being scurse as it is.  There’s a plenty for the house and a few head of stock; well, in a good wet year a person could raise a little garden, maybe; few radishes and beans, and things like that.  But uh course, that can’t hardly be called an improvement, ’cause it was there when I took the place.  A greaser, he had the land fenced and was usin’ the spring ‘n’ range like it was his own, and most folks, they was scared to file on it.  But she’s sure filed on now, and I’ve got six weeks yet before it can be jumped.

“Well, there’s a shed for stock, and a pretty fair brush corral, and I built me a pretty fair road in to the place—­about a mile off the main road, it is.  I done that odd times the year I was on the place.  The sheep I sold; sheep’s a good price now.  I only had seventeen—­coyotes and greasers, they kep’ stealin’ ’em on me, or I’d ‘n’ had more.  I’d ‘a’ lost ’em all, I guess, if it hadn’t been for Loma—­dog I got with me.  Them—­”