The other did not miss the point of the suggestion. "I didn't bet on anything," he laughed.
"It's funny nobody picked you up on the road out here," the cowboy next offered pointedly. "The folks started home early this morning—and Jim Reid and his family passed me about an hour ago—they were in an automobile. The Simmons stage must have caught up with you somewhere."
The stranger's face flushed, and he seemed trying to find some answer.
The cowboy watched him curiously; then in a musing tone added the suggestion, "Some lonesome up here on foot."
"But there are times, you know," returned the other desperately, "when a man prefers to be alone."
The cowboy straightened in his saddle and lifted his reins. "Thanks," he said dryly, "I reckon I'd better be moving."
But the other spoke quickly. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Acton, I did not mean that for you."
The horseman dropped his hands again to the saddle horn, and resumed his lounging posture, thus tacitly accepting the apology. "You have the advantage of me," he said.
The stranger laughed. "Everyone knows that 'Wild Horse Phil' of the Cross-Triangle Ranch won the bronco-riding championship yesterday. I saw you ride."
Philip Acton's face showed boyish embarrassment.
The other continued, with his strange enthusiasm. "It was great work—wonderful! I never saw anything like it."
There was no mistaking the genuineness of his admiration, nor could he hide that wistful look in his eyes.
"Shucks!" said the cowboy uneasily. "I could pick a dozen of the boys in that outfit who can ride all around me. It was just my luck, that's all—I happened to draw an easy one."
"Easy!" ejaculated the stranger, seeing again in his mind the fighting, plunging, maddened, outlawed brute that this boy-faced man had mastered. "And I suppose catching and throwing those steers was easy, too?"
The cowboy was plainly wondering at the man's peculiar enthusiasm for these most commonplace things. "The roping? Why, that was no more than we're doing all the time."
"I don't mean the roping," returned the other, "I mean when you rode up beside one of those steers that was running at full speed, and caught him by the horns with your bare hands, and jumped from your saddle, and threw the beast over you, and then lay there with his horns pinning you down! You aren't doing that all the time, are you? You don't mean to tell me that such things as that are a part of your everyday work!"
"Oh, the bull doggin'! Why, no," admitted Phil, with an embarrassed laugh, "that was just fun, you know."
The stranger stared at him, speechless. Fun! In the name of all that is most modern in civilization, what manner of men were these who did such things in fun! If this was their recreation, what must their work be!
"Do you mind my asking," he said wistfully, "how you learned to do such things?"
"Why, I don't know—we just do them, I reckon."
"And could anyone learn to ride as you ride, do you think?" The question came with marked eagerness.
"I don't see why not," answered the cowboy honestly.
The stranger shook his head doubtfully and looked away over the wild land where the shadows of the late afternoon were lengthening.
"Where are you going to stop to-night?" Phil Acton asked suddenly.
The stranger did not take his eyes from the view that seemed to hold for him such peculiar interest. "Really," he answered indifferently, "I had not thought of that."
"I should think you'd be thinking of it along about supper time, if you've walked from town since morning."
The stranger looked up with sudden interest; but the cowboy fancied that there was a touch of bitterness under the droll tone of his reply. "Do you know, Mr. Acton, I have never been really hungry in my life. It might be interesting to try it once, don't you think?"
Phil Acton laughed, as he returned, "It might be interesting, all right, but I think I better tell you, just the same, that there's a ranch down yonder in the timber. It's nothing but a goat ranch, but I reckon they would take you in. It's too far to the Cross-Triangle for me to ask you there. You can see the buildings, though, from here."
The stranger sprang up in quick interest. "You can? The Cross-Triangle Ranch?"
"Sure," the cowboy smiled and pointed into the distance. "Those red spots over there are the roofs. Jim Reid's place—the Pot-Hook-S—is just this side of the meadows, and a little to the south. The old Acton homestead—where I was born—is in that bunch of cottonwoods, across the wash from the Cross-Triangle."
But strive as he might the stranger's eyes could discern no sign of human habitation in those vast reaches that lay before him.
"If you are ever over that way, drop in," said Phil cordially. "Mr. Baldwin will be glad to meet you."
"Do you really mean that?" questioned the other doubtfully.
"We don't say such things in this country if we don't mean them, Stranger," was the cool retort.
"Of course, I beg your pardon, Mr. Acton," came the confused reply. "I should like to see the ranch. I may—I will—That is, if I—" He stopped as if not knowing how to finish, and with a gesture of hopelessness turned away to stand silently looking back toward the town, while his face was dark with painful memories, and his lips curved in that mirthless, self-mocking smile.
And Philip Acton, seeing, felt suddenly that he had rudely intruded upon the privacy of one who had sought the solitude of that lonely place to hide the hurt of some bitter experience. A certain native gentleness made the man of the ranges understand that this stranger was face to face with some crisis in his life—that he was passing through one of those trials through which a man must pass alone. Had it been possible the cowboy would have apologized. But that would have been an added unkindness. Lifting the reins and sitting erect in the saddle, he said indifferently, "Well, I must be moving. I take a short cut here. So long! Better make it on down to the goat ranch—it's not far."
He touched his horse with the spur and the animal sprang away.
"Good-bye!" called the stranger, and that wistful look was in his eyes as the rider swung his horse aside from the road, plunged down the mountain side, and dashed away through the brush and over the rocks with reckless speed. With a low exclamation of wondering admiration, the man climbed hastily to a higher point, and from there watched until horse and rider, taking a steeper declivity without checking their breakneck course, dropped from sight in a cloud of dust. The faint sound of the sliding rocks and gravel dislodged by the flying feet died away; the cloud of dust dissolved in the thin air. The stranger looked away into the blue distance in another vain attempt to see the red spots that marked the Cross-Triangle Ranch.
Slowly the man returned to his seat on the rock. The long shadows of Granite Mountain crept out from the base of the cliffs farther and farther over the country below. The blue of the distant hills changed to mauve with deeper masses of purple in the shadows where the canyons are. The lonely figure on the summit of the Divide did not move.
The sun hid itself behind the line of mountains, and the blue of the sky in the west changed slowly to gold against which the peaks and domes and points were silhouetted as if cut by a graver's tool, and the bold cliffs and battlements of old Granite grew coldly gray in the gloom. As the night came on and the details of its structure were lost, the mountain, to the watching man on the Divide, assumed the appearance of a mighty fortress—a fortress, he thought, to which a generation of men might retreat from a civilization that threatened them with destruction; and once more the