s knee and offered
me one, I broke loose. Silence may be golden, but even old King Midas got
too big a dose of gold, once upon a time, if one may believe tradition.

"I hate to butt into a man's meditations," I said, looking him straight in
the eye, "but there's a limit to everything, and you've played right up to
it. You've had time, my friend, to remember all your sins and plan enough
more to keep you hustling the allotted span; you've been given an
opportunity to reconstruct the universe and breed a new philosophy of
life. For Heaven's sake, _say_ something!"

Frosty eyed me for a minute, and the muscles at the corners of his mouth
twitched. "Sure," he responded cheerfully. "I'm something like you; I hate
to break into a man's meditations. It looks like snow."

"Do you think it's going to storm?" I retorted in the same tone; it had
been snowing great guns for the last three hours. We both laughed, and
Frosty unbent and told me a lot about Bay State Ranch and the country
around it.

Part of the information was an eye-opener; I wished I had known it when
dad was handing out that roast to me--I rather think I could have made him
cry enough. I tagged the information and laid it away for future
reference.

As I got the country mapped out in my mind, we were in a huge capital H.
The eastern line, toward which we were angling, was a river they call the
Midas--though I'll never tell you why, unless it's a term ironical. The
western line is another river, the Joliette, and the cross-bar is a range
of hills--they might almost be called mountains--which I had been facing
all that morning till the snow came between and shut them off; White
Divide, it is called, and we were creeping around the end, between them
and the Midas. It seemed queer that there was no way of crossing, for the
Bay State lies almost in a direct line south from Osage, Frosty told me,
and the country we were traversing was rough as White Divide could be, and
I said so to Frosty. Right here is where I got my first jolt.

"There's a fine pass cut through White Divide by old Mama Nature," Frosty
said, in the sort of tone a man takes when he could say a lot more, but
refrains.

"Then why in Heaven's name don't you travel it?"

"Because it isn't healthy for Ragged H folks to travel that way," he said,
in the same eloquent tone.

"Who are the Ragged H folks, and what's the matter with them?" I wanted to
know--for I smelled a mystery.

He looked at me si