McTeague heard two brakemen discussing him one night as they stood outside by the halted train.  “The livery-stable keeper called him a bastard; that’s what Picachos told me,” one of them remarked, “and started to draw his gun; an’ this fellar did for him with a hayfork.  He’s a horse doctor, this chap is, and the livery-stable keeper had got the law on him so’s he couldn’t practise any more, an’ he was sore about it.”

Near a place called Queen’s the train reentered California, and McTeague observed with relief that the line of track which had hitherto held westward curved sharply to the south again.  The train was unmolested; occasionally the crew fought with a gang of tramps who attempted to ride the brake beams, and once in the northern part of Inyo County, while they were halted at a water tank, an immense Indian buck, blanketed to the ground, approached McTeague as he stood on the roadbed stretching his legs, and without a word presented to him a filthy, crumpled letter.  The letter was to the effect that the buck Big Jim was a good Indian and deserving of charity; the signature was illegible.  The dentist stared at the letter, returned it to the buck, and regained the train just as it started.  Neither had spoken; the buck did not move from his position, and fully five minutes afterward, when the slow-moving freight was miles away, the dentist looked back and saw him still standing motionless between the rails, a forlorn and solitary point of red, lost in the immensity of the surrounding white blur of the desert.

At length the mountains began again, rising up on either side of the track; vast, naked hills of white sand and red rock, spotted with blue shadows.  Here and there a patch of green was spread like a gay table-cloth over the sand.  All at once Mount Whitney leaped over the horizon.  Independence was reached and passed; the freight, nearly emptied by now, and much shortened, rolled along the shores of Owen Lake.  At a place called Keeler it stopped definitely.  It was the terminus of the road.

The town of Keeler was a one-street town, not unlike Iowa Hill—­the post-office, the bar and hotel, the Odd Fellows’ Hall, and the livery stable being the principal buildings.

“Where to now?” muttered McTeague to himself as he sat on the edge of the bed in his room in the hotel.  He hung the canary in the window, filled its little bathtub, and watched it take its bath with enormous satisfaction.  “Where to now?” he muttered again.  “This is as far as the railroad goes, an’ it won’ do for me to stay in a town yet a while; no, it won’ do.  I got to clear out.  Where to?  That’s the word, where to?  I’ll go down to supper now”—­He went on whispering his thoughts aloud, so that they would take more concrete shape in his mind—­“I’ll go down to supper now, an’ then I’ll hang aroun’ the bar this evening till I get the lay of this land.  Maybe this is fruit country, though it looks more like a cattle country.  Maybe it’s a mining country.  If it’s a mining country,” he continued, puckering his heavy eyebrows, “if it’s a mining country, an’ the mines are far enough off the roads, maybe I’d better get to the mines an’ lay quiet for a month before I try to get any farther south.”