mained utterly beyond me.
Scipio's experience was not yet three weeks long. So I let him alone as
to all this, discussing with him most other things good and evil in
the world, and being convinced of much further innocence; for Scipio's
twenty odd years were indeed a library of life. I have never met a
better heart, a shrewder wit, and looser morals, with yet a native sense
of decency and duty somewhere hard and fast enshrined.

But all the while I was wondering about the Virginian: eating with him,
sleeping with him (only not so sound as he did), and riding beside him
often for many hours.

Experiments in conversation I did make--and failed. One day particularly
while, after a sudden storm of hail had chilled the earth numb and white
like winter in fifteen minutes, we sat drying and warming ourselves by
a fire that we built, I touched upon that theme of equality on which I
knew him to hold opinions as strong as mine. "Oh," he would reply, and
"Cert'nly"; and when I asked him what it was in a man that made him a
leader of men, he shook his head and puffed his pipe. So then, noticing
how the sun had brought the earth in half an hour back from winter to
summer again, I spoke of our American climate.

It was a potent drug, I said, for millions to be swallowing every day.

"Yes," said he, wiping the damp from his Winchester rifle.

Our American climate, I said, had worked remarkable changes, at least.

"Yes," he said; and did not ask what they were.

So I had to tell him. "It has made successful politicians of the Irish.
That's one. And it has given our whole race the habit of poker."

Bang went his Winchester. The bullet struck close to my left. I sat up
angrily.

"That's the first foolish thing I ever saw you do!" I said.

"Yes," he drawled slowly, "I'd ought to have done it sooner. He was
pretty near lively again." And then he picked up a rattlesnake six feet
behind me. It had been numbed by the hail, part revived by the sun, and
he had shot its head off.

XVIII. "WOULD YOU BE A PARSON?"

After this I gave up my experiments in conversation. So that by the
final afternoon of our journey, with Sunk Creek actually in sight, and
the great grasshoppers slatting their dry song over the sage-brush, and
the time at hand when the Virginian and Trampas would be "man to man,"
my thoughts rose to a considerable pitch of speculation.

And now that talking part of the Virginian, which had been nine days
asleep,