ad of
steers for me a half dozen times a year. You've had the spring rodeo in
your hands ever since I can remember. You've been one-half pa of that
kid. Has times changed so much that you got a right to talk the way
you're talking?"

"You're going back into the States, though, Colonel," says I. "They turn
men out there when they're forty--and I'll never see forty again. I read
in the papers that forty is the dead line back there."

"It ain't in Wyoming," says he.

"We won't be in Wyoming no more, there," says I.

He set and looked off across the range toward the Gunsight Gap, at the
head of the river, and I could see him get white under his freckles. He
was game, but he was scared.

"We can't help it, Curly," says he. "We've raised the girl between us
and we've got to stick all the way through. You've been my foreman here
and you got to be my foreman there in the city. We'll land there with a
few million dollars or so and I reckon we'll learn the game after a
while."

"I'd make a hell of a vallay, wouldn't I, Colonel?" says I.

"I didn't ast you to be no vallay for me," says he. "I ast you to be my
foreman--you know damn well what I mean."

I did know, too, far as that's concerned, and I thought more of Old Man
Wright then than I ever did. Of course it's hard for men to talk much
out on the range, and we didn't talk. We only set for quite a while,
with our knees up, breaking sticks and looking off at the Gunsight Gap,
on top of the range--just as if we hadn't saw it there any day these
past forty years.

I was plenty scared about this new move and so was he. It's just like
riding into a ford where the water is stained with snow or mud and
running high, and where there ain't no low bank on the other side. You
don't know how it is, but you have to chance it. It looked bad to me and
it did to him; but we had rid into such places before together and we
both knew we had to do it now.

"Colonel," says I at last to him, "I don't like it none, but I got to go
through with you if you want me to."

He sort of hit the side of my knee with the back of his hand, like he
said: "It's a trade." And it was a trade.

That's how come us to move from Wyoming to Chicago, looking for some of
them Better Things.

II

WHERE WE THREW IN

"Well, Curly," says Old Man Wright to me one day a couple of months
after we had our first talk, "I done it!"

"You sold her?" says I.

"Yes," says he.

"How much did you set '