“She did so; but she couldn’t tell me much more.  Say, son, how on top of earth did you happen to blow in at midnight, with Jack Barto for your herd leader?”

“It’s a fairy tale, and you won’t believe it—­of a Blount,” was the laughing reply.  “I left Boston Monday, and should have reached the capital last night.  But my train was laid out by a yard wreck at Twin Buttes just before dark, and I left it and took to the hills—­horseback.  Don’t ask me why I did such a thing as that; I can only say that the smell of the sage-brush got into my blood and I simply had to do it.”

The old cattle-king was standing with his feet planted wide apart and his hands deep in his pockets.  “You hired a horse!” he chuckled, with the humorous wrinkles coming and going at the corners of the kindly eyes.  “Did you have the nerve to think you were going to climb down from a three-legged stool in a Boston law office one day and ride the fifty miles from Twin Buttes to the capital the next?”

“Oh, no; I wasn’t altogether daft.  But knowing where I was, I did think I could ride out to Debbleby’s.  So I hired the bronco and set out—­and that reminds me:  the horse will have to be sent back to the liveryman in Twin Buttes, some way.”

“Never mind the cayuse.  Shackford would have made you a present of it outright if you had told him who you were.  Go on with your story.  It listens like a novel.”

“I took the general direction all right on leaving Twin Buttes, and kept it until I got among the Lost River hogbacks.  But after that I was pretty successfully lost.  I’m ashamed to tell it, but about half of the time the moon didn’t seem to be in the right place.”

“Lost, were you?  And Jack Barto found you?” queried the father.

“Barto hadn’t lost me to any appreciable extent,” was the half-humorous emendation.  And then:  “Who is this ubiquitous Barto who goes around playing the hold-up one minute and the good angel the next?”

“He is a sort of general utility man for Hathaway, the head pusher of the Twin Buttes Lumber Company.  He is supposed to be a timber-cruiser and log-sealer, but I reckon he doesn’t work very hard at his trade.  Down in the lower wards of New York they’d call him a boss heeler, maybe.  But you say ‘hold-up’; you don’t mean to tell me that Jack Barto robbed you, son!”

“Oh, no; he held me up with a gun while his helpers pulled me off the bronco and hog-tied me, and then fell to discussing with the other two the advisability of knocking me on the head and dropping me into Lost River Canyon—­that’s all.  Of course, I knew they had stumbled upon the wrong man; and after a while I succeeded in making Barto accept that hypothesis; at least, he accepted it sufficiently to bring me here for identification.  Since he wouldn’t talk, and I didn’t recognize the trail or the place, I hadn’t the slightest notion of my whereabouts—­not the least in the world; didn’t know where he was taking me or where I had landed when we stopped here.”