anybody else's." He paused, and looked across the wide, mellowing
plain with the expression of easy-going gravity so common with him. Then
he looked at Em'ly in the tree and the yellow chicken.

"It ain't so damned funny," said he.

We went in to supper, and I came out to find the hen lying on the
ground, dead. I took the chicken to the family in the hen-house.

No, it was not altogether funny any more. And I did not think less of
the Virginian when I came upon him surreptitiously digging a little hole
in the field for her.

"I have buried some citizens here and there," said he, "that I have
respected less."

And when the time came for me to leave Sunk Creek, my last word to the
Virginian was, "Don't forget Em'ly."

"I ain't likely to," responded the cow-puncher. "She is just one o' them
parables."

Save when he fell into his native idioms (which, they told me, his
wanderings had well-nigh obliterated until that year's visit to his home
again revived them in his speech), he had now for a long while dropped
the "seh," and all other barriers between us. We were thorough friends,
and had exchanged many confidences both of the flesh and of the spirit.
He even went the length of saying that he would write me the Sunk Creek
news if I would send him a line now and then. I have many letters from
him now. Their spelling came to be faultless, and in the beginning was
little worse than George Washington's.

The Judge himself drove me to the railroad by another way--across the
Bow Leg Mountains, and south through Balaam's Ranch and Drybone to Rock
Creek.

"I'll be very homesick," I told him.

"Come and pull the latch-string whenever you please," he bade me. I
wished that I might! No lotus land ever cast its spell upon man's heart
more than Wyoming had enchanted mine.

VII. THROUGH TWO SNOWS

"Dear Friend [thus in the spring the Virginian wrote me], Yours
received. It must be a poor thing to be sick. That time I was shot at
Canada de Oro would have made me sick if it had been a littel lower or
if I was much of a drinking man. You will be well if you give over city
life and take a hunt with me about August or say September for then the
elk will be out of the velvett.

"Things do not please me here just now and I am going to settel it
by vamosing. But I would be glad to see you. It would be pleasure not
business for me to show you plenty elk and get you strong. I am not
crybabying to the Judge or making any ki