Blount was not sorry to be left alone.  In response to a vague stirring of something within him—­a thing which might have been the primitive underman yawning and stretching to its awakening—­he had been trying in the window-facing intervals to reconstruct the passing panorama of mountain and plain upon the recollections of his boyhood.  As yet there was little familiarity save in the broader outlines.  Where he remembered only the fallow-dun prairie, dotted with dog-mounds, there were now vast ranches planted to sod corn; and upon the hills the cattle ranges were no longer open.  The towns, too, at which the train made its momentary stops, were changed.  The straggling shack hamlets of the cattle-shipping period, with the shed-roofed railroad station, the whitewashed loading-corral, and the towering water-tank—­all backgrounded by a thin line of saloons and dance-halls—­had disappeared completely, and the window-watcher found himself looking in vain for the flap-hatted, cigarette-smoking horsemen with which the West of his boyhood had been chiefly peopled.

Farther along toward evening the great range, which had been visible for hours in the westward vista, began to define itself in peaks and high, bald shoulderings of wind-swept mesas.  Here was something definite and tangible for the stirring underman to lay hold upon.  Blount, the sober-minded, the self-contained, found a curious transformation working itself out in quickened pulses and exhilarating nerve-tinglings.  Boston, the Law School, the East of the narrow walk-ways and the still narrower rut of custom and convention, were fading into a past which already seemed age-old and half forgotten.  He threw open the window at his elbow and drank in deep inspirations of the hill-sweeping blast.  It was sweet in his nostrils, and the keen crispness of it was as fine wine in his blood.  After all, he had been but a sojourner in the other world, and this was his homeland.

At the dining-car dinner, which was served while the higher peaks of the main range were as vast islands floating in a sea of crimson and gold, Blount missed the man of many troubles.  The dining-car was well filled, and, though the faces of the diners were all unfamiliar, the hum of talk, the hurrying of the waiters, and the subdued clamor drowning itself in the under-drone of the drumming wheels answered well enough for companionship.  There are times when even the voice of a friend is an intrusion, and the returning exile had happed upon one of them.  Largeness, the inspiring breadth of the immensities, was what he craved most; and when he had cut the many-coursed dinner short, he hurried back to his Pullman window, hoping that he might have the smoking-compartment to himself again.