I was surprised at Frosty; there he had been armed, all the time, and I never guessed it.  Even when we went to bed the night before, I had not glimpsed a weapon.  Clearly, he could not be a cowboy, I reflected, else he would have worn a cartridge-belt sagging picturesquely down over one hip, and his gun dangling from it.  He put the gun away, and I don’t know where; somewhere out of sight it went, and Frosty turned off the trail and went driving wild across the prairie.  I asked him why, and he said, “Short cut.”

Then a wind crept out of the north, and with it the snow.  We were climbing low ridges and dodging into hollows, and when the snow spread a white veil over the land, I looked at Frosty out of the tail of my eye, wondering if he did not wish he had kept to the road—­trail, it is called in the rangeland.

If he did, he certainly kept it to himself; he went on climbing hills and setting the brake at the top, to slide into a hollow, and his face kept its inscrutable calm; whatever he thought was beyond guessing at.

When he had watered the horses at a little creek that was already skimmed with ice, and unwrapped a package of sandwiches on his knee and offered me one, I broke loose.  Silence may be golden, but even old King Midas got too big a dose of gold, once upon a time, if one may believe tradition.

“I hate to butt into a man’s meditations,” I said, looking him straight in the eye, “but there’s a limit to everything, and you’ve played right up to it.  You’ve had time, my friend, to remember all your sins and plan enough more to keep you hustling the allotted span; you’ve been given an opportunity to reconstruct the universe and breed a new philosophy of life.  For Heaven’s sake, say something!”

Frosty eyed me for a minute, and the muscles at the corners of his mouth twitched.  “Sure,” he responded cheerfully.  “I’m something like you; I hate to break into a man’s meditations.  It looks like snow.”

“Do you think it’s going to storm?” I retorted in the same tone; it had been snowing great guns for the last three hours.  We both laughed, and Frosty unbent and told me a lot about Bay State Ranch and the country around it.

Part of the information was an eye-opener; I wished I had known it when dad was handing out that roast to me—­I rather think I could have made him cry enough.  I tagged the information and laid it away for future reference.

As I got the country mapped out in my mind, we were in a huge capital H. The eastern line, toward which we were angling, was a river they call the Midas—­though I’ll never tell you why, unless it’s a term ironical.  The western line is another river, the Joliette, and the cross-bar is a range of hills—­they might almost be called mountains—­which I had been facing all that morning till the snow came between and shut them off; White Divide, it is called, and we were creeping around the end, between them and the Midas.  It seemed queer that there was no way of crossing, for the Bay State lies almost in a direct line south from Osage, Frosty told me, and the country we were traversing was rough as White Divide could be, and I said so to Frosty.  Right here is where I got my first jolt.