Just when he was given over to the most gloomy forebodings, a white square stood out for a moment sharply against a background of pines, far below him in a coulee where the sun was peering fleetingly before it dove out of sight over a hill.  Happy Jack—­of a truth, the most unhappy Jack one could find, though he searched far and long—­stood still and eyed the white patch critically.  There was only the one; but another might be hidden in the trees.  Still, there was no herd grazing anywhere in the coulee, and no jingle of cavvy bells came to his ears, though he listened long.  He was sure that it was not the camp of the Flying U, where he would be ministered unto faithfully, to be sure, yet where the ministrations would be mingled with much wit-sharpened raillery harder even to bear than was his present condition of sun-blisters and scratches.  He thanked the Lord in sincere if unorthodox terms, and went down the hill in long, ungraceful strides.

It was far down that hill, and it was farther across the coulee.  Each step grew more wearisome to Happy Jack, unaccustomed as he was to using his own feet as a mode of travel.  But away in the edge of the pine grove were food and raiment, and a shelter from the night that was creeping down on him with the hurried stealth of a mountain lion after its quarry.  He shifted the sheepskin mantle for the thousandth time; this time he untied it from his galled shoulders and festooned it modestly if unbecomingly about his middle.

Feeling sure of the unfailing hospitality of the rangeland, be the tent-dweller whom he might, Happy Jack walked boldly through the soft, spring twilight that lasts long in Montana, and up to the very door of the tent.  A figure—­a female figure—­slender and topped by thin face and eyes sheltered behind glasses, rose up, gazed upon him in horror, shrieked till one could hear her a mile, and fell backward into the tent.  Another female figure appeared, looked, and shrieked also—­and even louder than did the first.  Happy Jack, with a squawk of dismay, turned and flew incontinently afar into the dusk.  A man’s voice he heard, shouting inquiry; another, shouting what, from a distance, sounded like threats.  Happy Jack did not wait to make sure; he ran blindly, until he brought up in a patch of prickly-pear, at which he yelled, forgetting for the instant that he was pursued.  Somehow he floundered out and away from the torture of the stinging spines, and took to the hills.  A moon, big as the mouth of a barrel, climbed over a ridge and betrayed him to the men searching below, and they shouted and fired a gun.  Happy Jack did not believe they could shoot very straight, but he was in no mood to take chances; he sought refuge among a jumble of great, gray bowlders; sat himself down in the shadow and caressed gingerly the places where the prickly-pear had punctured his skin, and gave himself riotously over to blasphemy.