ctorious.

It must have been five miles that we travelled in silence, losing and
seeing the horizon among the ceaseless waves of the earth. Then I looked
back, and there was Medicine Bow, seemingly a stone's throw behind
us. It was a full half-hour before I looked back again, and there sure
enough was always Medicine Bow. A size or two smaller, I will admit, but
visible in every feature, like something seen through the wrong end of
a field glass. The East-bound express was approaching the town, and I
noticed the white steam from its whistle; but when the sound reached us,
the train had almost stopped. And in reply to my comment upon this, the
Virginian deigned to remark that it was more so in Arizona.

"A man come to Arizona," he said, "with one of them telescopes to study
the heavenly bodies. He was a Yankee, seh, and a right smart one, too.
And one night we was watchin' for some little old fallin' stars that he
said was due, and I saw some lights movin' along across the mesa pretty
lively, an' I sang out. But he told me it was just the train. And I told
him I didn't know yu' could see the cyars that plain from his place,
'Yu' can see them,' he said to me, 'but it is las' night's cyars you're
lookin' at.'" At this point the Virginian spoke severely to one of the
horses. "Of course," he then resumed to me, "that Yankee man did not
mean quite all he said.--You, Buck!" he again broke off suddenly to
the horse. "But Arizona, seh," he continued, "it cert'nly has a mos'
deceivin' atmospheah. Another man told me he had seen a lady close one
eye at him when he was two minutes hard run from her." This time the
Virginian gave Buck the whip.

"What effect," I inquired with a gravity equal to his own, "does this
extraordinary foreshortening have upon a quart of whiskey?"

"When it's outside yu', seh, no distance looks too far to go to it."

He glanced at me with an eye that held more confidence than hitherto he
had been able to feel in me. I had made one step in his approval. But
I had many yet to go. This day he preferred his own thoughts to my
conversation, and so he did all the days of this first journey; while
I should have greatly preferred his conversation to my thoughts. He
dismissed some attempts that I made upon the subject of Uncle Hughey so
that I had not the courage to touch upon Trampas, and that chill brief
collision which might have struck the spark of death. Trampas! I had
forgotten him till this silent drive I