It had been his first intention to take stage to the nearest mining district, but the diminution of his small capital forbade that outlay, and he decided to walk there by the highroad, of whose general direction he had informed himself.  In half an hour the lights of the flat, struggling city, and their reflection in the shallow, turbid river before it, had sunk well behind him.  The air was cool and soft; a yellow moon swam in the slight haze that rose above the tules; in the distance a few scattered cottonwoods and sycamores marked like sentinels the road.  When he had walked some distance he sat down beneath one of them to make a frugal supper from the dry rations in his pack, but in the absence of any spring he was forced to quench his thirst with a glass of water in a wayside tavern.  Here he was good-humoredly offered something stronger, which he declined, and replied to certain curious interrogations by saying that he expected to overtake his friends in a wagon further on.  A new distrust of mankind had begun to make the boy an adept in innocent falsehood, the more deceptive as his careless, cheerful manner, the result of his relief at leaving the city, and his perfect ease in the loving companionship of night and nature, certainly gave no indication of his homelessness and poverty.

It was long past midnight, when, weary in body, but still hopeful and happy in mind, he turned off the dusty road into a vast rolling expanse of wild oats, with the same sense of security of rest as a traveler to his inn.  Here, completely screened from view by the tall stalks of grain that rose thickly around him to the height of a man’s shoulder, he beat down a few of them for a bed, on which he deposited his blanket.  Placing his pack for a pillow, he curled himself up in his blanket, and speedily fell asleep.

He awoke at sunrise, refreshed, invigorated, and hungry.  But he was forced to defer his first self-prepared breakfast until he had reached water, and a less dangerous place than the wild-oat field to build his first camp fire.  This he found a mile further on, near some dwarf willows on the bank of a half-dry stream.  Of his various efforts to prepare his first meal, the fire was the most successful; the coffee was somewhat too substantially thick, and the bacon and herring lacked definiteness of quality from having been cooked in the same vessel.  In this boyish picnic he missed Susy, and recalled, perhaps a little bitterly, her coldness at parting.  But the novelty of his situation, the brilliant sunshine and sense of freedom, and the road already awakening to dusty life with passing teams, dismissed everything but the future from his mind.  Readjusting his pack, he stepped on cheerily.  At noon he was overtaken by a teamster, who in return for a match to light his pipe gave him a lift of a dozen miles.  It is to be feared that Clarence’s account of himself was equally fanciful with his previous story, and that the teamster parted