Another ineffectual attempt to find out how soon the relief train from the capital might be expected decided Blount.  Arranging with the Pullman conductor to have his hand-luggage left in Gantry’s office at the capital, the man in search of his boyhood crossed quickly to a livery-stable opposite the station, bargained for a saddle-horse, borrowed a poncho and a pair of leggings, and prepared to break violently, for the moment at least, with all the civilized traditions.  He would go and see Debbleby—­drop in upon the old horse-breeder without warning, and thus get his first revivified impression of the homeland unmixed with any of the disappointing changes which were doubtless awaiting him at the real journey’s end.

Now it chanced that the livery-stable was an adjunct to the single hotel in the small sawmill town, and as Blount was mounting to ride he saw the thin-faced man, whom the ranchman, Griggs, had named for him, standing on the porch of the hotel in earnest talk with three others who, from their appearance, might have figured either as “timber jacks” or cowboys.  Blount was on the point of recognizing his companion of the Pullman smoking-compartment as he rode past the hotel to take the trail to the northward, but a curious conviction that the gentleman with the bird-of-prey eyes was making him the subject of the earnest talk with the three men of doubtful occupation restrained him.  A moment later, when he looked back from the crossing of the railroad track, he saw that all four of the men on the porch were watching him.  This he saw; and if the backward glance had been prolonged for a single instant he might also have seen a big, barrel-bodied man with a red face stumbling out of the side door of the shack hotel to make vigorous and commanding signals to stop him.  But this he missed.

There was an excuse for the oversight as well as for the speedy blotting out of the picture of the four men watching him from the porch of the hotel.  With a fairly good horse under him, with the squeak of the saddle-leather in his ears and the smell of it in his nostrils, and with the wide world of the immensities into which to ride unhampered and free, the lost boyhood was found.  Not for the most soul-satisfying professional triumph the fettered East could offer him would he have curtailed the free-reined flight into the silent wilderness by a single mile.

For the first half-hour of the invigorating gallop the fugitive from civilization had the sunset glow to help him find the trail.  After that the moon rose, and the landmarks, which had seemed more or less familiar in daylight, lost their remembered featurings.  During the first few miles the trail had led broadly across the table-land, with the eastern mountains withdrawing and the Lost River Range looming larger as its lofty sky-line was struck out sharply against the sunset horizon.  Farther on, in the transition darkness between sunset and moon-rise, the trail disappeared