ches the woodland
and cannot find.

The dusty hills had gulped the train that carried her before the Duke
rode round the station and joined his noisy comrades. Everybody shook
hands with him, everybody invited him to have a drink. He put them
off--friend, acquaintance, stranger, on their pressing invitation to
drink--with the declaration that his horse came first in his
consideration. After he had put Whetstone in the livery barn and fed
him, he would join them for a round, he said.

They trooped into the saloon to square their bets, the Duke going his
way to the barn. There they drank and grew noisier than before, to come
out from time to time, mount their horses, gallop up and down the road
that answered Misery for a street, and shoot good ammunition into the
harmless air.

Somebody remarked after a while that the Duke was a long time feeding
that horse. Taterleg and others went to investigate. He had not been
there, the keeper of the livery barn said. A further look around
exhausted all the possible hiding-places of Misery. The Duke was not
there.

"Well," said Taterleg, puzzled, "I guess he's went."

CHAPTER V

FEET UPON THE ROAD

"I always thought I'd go out West, but somehow I never got around to
it," Taterleg said. "How far do you aim to go, Duke?"

"As far as the notion takes me, I guess."

It was about a month after the race that this talk between Taterleg and
the Duke took place, on a calm afternoon in a camp far from the site of
that one into which the peddler of cutlery had trundled his disabled
bicycle a year before. The Duke had put off his calfskin vest, the
weather being too hot for it. Even Taterleg had made sacrifices to
appearance in favor of comfort, his piratical corduroys being replaced
by overalls.

The Duke had quit his job, moved by the desire to travel on and see the
world, he said. He said no word to any man about the motive behind that
desire, very naturally, for he was not the kind of a man who opened the
door of his heart. But to himself he confessed the hunger for an
unknown face, for the lure of an onward-beckoning hand which he was no
longer able to ignore.

Since that day she had strained over the brass railing of the car to
hold him in her sight until the curtain of dust intervened, he had felt
her call urging him into the West, the strength of her beckoning hand
drawing him the way she had gone, to search the world for her and find
her on some full and glorious