Page:Son of the wind.djvu/48

 lightenment—only a fresh perplexity. "But, I thought you said—"

"One moment. I'm coming to that presently. I only wanted you to see that I wasn't so drunk or so visionary as that poor devil who brought me along, though I own that I was pretty much excited. He wanted a hundred dollars for taking me up country to the place where the creature was supposed to be. I told him I'd give him twenty dollars for that, and a hundred if I found the horse. The end of the business was that I didn't take the midnight for the city. Instead, I put him, and myself, on the overland at one o'clock, and one of my animals into the box-car, because she'd carry us up country faster than these mountain rats; changed at Reno for Beckwith, and, at seven-thirty this morning, I started from Beckwith with him still pretty well under the influence.

"It didn't occur to me that he would turn tail at the last moment. People, once they are with me in a thing, usually stick." He said this without consciousness, merely as a fact which he had seen demonstrated, and the scholar accepted it with the naïveté equal to his own. "At first I thought it was the drink dying out of him, but there was something more in his behavior than that. It was queer! The further we went, the more we got up into the