I began to see where I might have economized a bit, and so have gone on eating regularly to the end of the journey.  I reflected that stewed terrapin, for instance, might possibly be considered an extravagance under the circumstances; and a fellow sentenced to honest toil and exiled to the wilderness should not, it seemed to me then, cause his table to be sprinkled, quite so liberally as I had done, with tall glasses—­nor need he tip the porter quite so often or so generously.  A dollar looked bigger to me, just then, than a wheel of the Yellow Peril.  I began to feel unkindly toward that porter! he had looked so abominably well-fed and sleek, and he had tips that I would be glad to feel in my own pocket again.  I stood alone upon the platform and gazed wistfully after the retreating train; many people have done that before me, if one may believe those who write novels, and for once in my life I felt a bond of sympathy between us.  It’s safe betting that I did more solid thinking on frenzied finance in the five minutes I stood there watching that train slid off beyond the sky-line than I’d done in all my life before.  I’d heard, of course, about fellows getting right down to cases, but I’d never personally experienced the sensation.  I’d always had money—­or, if I hadn’t, I knew where to go.  And dad had caught me when I’d all but overdrawn my account at the bank.  I was always doing that, for dad paid the bills.  That last night with Barney MacTague hadn’t been my night to win, and I’d dropped quite a lot there.  And—­oh, what’s the use?  I was broke, all right enough, and I was hungry enough to eat the proverbial crust.

It seemed to me it might be a good idea to hunt up the gentleman named Perry Potter, whom dad called his foreman.  I turned around and caught a tall, brown-faced native studying my back with grave interest.  He didn’t blush when I looked him in the eye, but smiled a tired smile and said he reckoned I was the chap he’d been sent to meet.  There was no welcome in his voice, I noticed.  I looked him over critically.

“Are you the gentleman with the alliterative cognomen?” I asked him airily, hoping he would be puzzled.

He was not, evidently.  “Perry Potter?  He’s at the ranch.”  He was damnably tolerant, and I said nothing.  I hate to make the same sort of fool of myself twice.  So when he proposed that we “hit the trail,” I followed meekly in his wake.  He did not offer to take my suit-case, and I was about to remind him of the oversight when it occurred to me that possibly he was not a servant—­he certainly didn’t act like one.  I carried my own suitcase—­which was, I have thought since, the only wise move I had made since I left home.

A strong but unsightly spring-wagon, with mud six inches deep on the wheels, seemed the goal, and we trailed out to it, picking up layers of soil as we went.  The ground did not look muddy, but it was; I have since learned that that particular phase of nature’s hypocrisy is called “doby.”  I don’t admire it, myself.  I stopped by the wagon and scraped my shoes on the cleanest spoke I could find, and swore.  My guide untied the horses, gathered up the reins, and sought a spoke on his side of the wagon; he looked across at me with a gleam of humanity in his eyes—­the first I had seen there.