was beginning. I wondered if I
should ever see him, or Steve, or any of those people again. And this
wonder I expressed aloud.

"There's no tellin' in this country," said the Virginian. "Folks come
easy, and they go easy. In settled places, like back in the States, even
a poor man mostly has a home. Don't care if it's only a barrel on a lot,
the fello' will keep frequentin' that lot, and if yu' want him yu' can
find him. But out hyeh in the sage-brush, a man's home is apt to be his
saddle blanket. First thing yu' know, he has moved it to Texas."

"You have done some moving yourself," I suggested.

But this word closed his mouth. "I have had a look at the country," he
said, and we were silent again. Let me, however, tell you here that he
had set out for a "look at the country" at the age of fourteen; and
that by his present age of twenty-four he had seen Arkansas, Texas,
New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming.
Everywhere he had taken care of himself, and survived; nor had his
strong heart yet waked up to any hunger for a home. Let me also tell you
that he was one of thousands drifting and living thus, but (as you shall
learn) one in a thousand.

Medicine Bow did not forever remain in sight. When next I thought of it
and looked behind, nothing was there but the road we had come; it lay
like a ship's wake across the huge ground swell of the earth. We were
swallowed in a vast solitude. A little while before sunset, a cabin came
in view; and here we passed our first night. Two young men lived here,
tending their cattle. They were fond of animals. By the stable a chained
coyote rushed nervously in a circle, or sat on its haunches and snapped
at gifts of food ungraciously. A tame young elk walked in and out of
the cabin door, and during supper it tried to push me off my chair. A
half-tame mountain sheep practised jumping from the ground to the roof.
The cabin was papered with posters of a circus, and skins of bear and
silver fox lay upon the floor. Until nine o'clock one man talked to the
Virginian, and one played gayly upon a concertina; and then we all went
to bed. The air was like December, but in my blankets and a buffalo robe
I kept warm, and luxuriated in the Rocky Mountain silence. Going to wash
before breakfast at sunrise, I found needles of ice in a pail. Yet it
was hard to remember that this quiet, open, splendid wilderness (with
not a peak in sight just here) was six thousand feet h