Pete, who had said good-bye to the sheriff the night before, turned his face toward the open with a good, an almost too good, horse between his knees and a new outlook upon the old familiar ranges and their devious trails.

Past a somber forest of cacti, shot with myriad angling shadows, desolate and forbidding, despite the open sky and the morning sun, Pete rode slowly, peering with eyes aslant at the dense growth close to the road, struggling to ignore the spot.  Despite his determination, he could not pass without glancing fearsomely as though he half-expected to see something there—­something to identify the spot as that shadowy place where Brent had stood that night . . .

Blue Smoke, hitherto as amiably disposed to take his time as was Pete himself, shied suddenly.  Through habit, Pete jabbed him with the spur, to straighten him back in the road again.  Pete had barely time to mutter an audible “I thought so!” when Blue Smoke humped himself.  Pete slackened to the first wild lunge, grabbed off his hat and swung it as Blue Smoke struck at the air with his fore feet, as though trying to climb an invisible ladder.  Pete swayed back as the horse came down in a mighty leap forward, and hooking his spurs in the cinch, rocked to each leap and lunge like a leaf caught up in a desert whirlwind.  When Pete saw that Smoke’s first fine frenzy had about evaporated, he urged him to further endeavors with the spurs, but Blue Smoke only grunted and dropped off into a most becoming and gentlemanly lope.  And Pete was not altogether displeased.  His back felt as though it had been seared with a branding-iron, and the range to the west was heaving most indecorously, cavorting around the horizon as though strangely excited by Blue Smoke’s sudden and seemingly unaccountable behavior.

“I reckon we’re both feelin’ better!” Pete told the pony.  “I needed jest that kind of a jolt to feel like I was livin’ ag’in.  But you needn’t be in such a doggone hurry to go and tell your friends how good you’re feelin’.  Jest come down off that lope.  We got all day to git there.”

Blue Smoke shook his head as Pete pulled him to a trot.  The cactus forest was behind them.  Ahead lay the open, warm brown in the sun, and across it ran a dwindling grayish line, the road that ran east and west across the desert,—­a good enough road as desert roads go, but Pete, despite his satisfaction in being out in the open again, grew somewhat tired of its monotonously even wagon-rutted width, and longed for a trail—­a faint, meandering trail that would swing from the road, dip into a sand arroyo, edge slanting up the farther bank, wriggle round a cluster of small hills, shoot out across a mesa, and climb slowly toward those hills to the west, finally to contort itself into serpentine switchbacks as it sought the crest—­and once on the crest (which was in reality but the visible edge of another great mesa), there would be grass for a horse and cedar-wood for a fire, and water with which to make coffee.