Finding little to hold him in the spectacle of the derailed locomotive, Blount strolled on through the railroad yard to the station and the town.  He remembered the place chiefly by its name.  In his boyhood it had been the nearest railroad forwarding-point for the mines at Lewiston, thirty miles beyond the Lost Hills.  Now, as it appeared, it had become a lumber-shipping station.  To the left of the railroad there were numerous sawmills, each with its mountain of waste dominated by a black chimney, screen-capped.  For the supply of logs an enormous flume led down from the slopes of the forested range on the south, a trough-like water-chute out of which, though the working-day was ended, the great logs were still tumbling in an intermittent stream.

North of the town the valley broke away into a region of bare mesas dotted with rounded, butte-like hills, with the buttressing ranges on either side to lift the eastern and western horizons.  The northern prospect enabled Blount to place himself accurately, and the tide of remembrance swept strongly in upon him.  Some forty-odd miles away to the northeast, just beyond the horizon-lifting lesser range, lay the “short-grass” region in which he had spent the happy boyhood.  An hour’s gallop through the hills to the westward the level rays of the setting sun would be playing upon the little station of Painted Hat, the one-time shipping-point for the home ranch.  And half-way between Painted Hat and the “Circle-Bar,” nestling in the hollowed hands of the mountains, were the horse-corrals of one Debbleby, a true hermit of the hills, and the boy Evan’s earliest school-master in the great book of Nature.

Blount’s one meliorating softness during the years of exile had manifested itself in an effort to keep track of Debbleby.  He knew that the old horse-breeder was still alive, and that he was still herding his brood mares at the ranch on the Pigskin.  The young man, fresh from the well-calculated East, threw up his head and sniffed the keen, cool breeze sweeping down from the northern hills.  He was not given to impulsive plan-changing.  On the contrary, he was slow to resolve and proportionately tenacious of the determination once made.  But the stirring of boyish memories accounted for something; and in the sanest brain there are sleeping cells of irresponsibility ready to spring alive at the touch of suggestion.  What if he should—­

He sat down upon the edge of the station platform and thought it out deliberately.  Since it would be hours before the tracks could be cleared and the rail journey resumed, what was to prevent him from taking an immediate and delightful plunge into the region of the heart-stirring recollections?  Doubtless old Jason Debbleby was at this moment sitting on the door-step of his lonely ranch-house in the Pigskin foot-hills, smoking his corn-cob pipe and, quite possibly, wondering what had become of the boy whom he had taught to “rope down” and saddle and ride.  Blount estimated the distance as he remembered it.  With a hired horse he might reach Debbleby’s by late bedtime; and after a night spent with the old ranchman he could ride on across the big mesa to the capital.