WE swapped not a word on the way to the railroad.

The judge seemed to be settled down into a sort of numb condition, and I was glad of it, for I did not feel like talking. He stood indifferently at one side when I bought tickets, and I was glad of that also. If I was to be purser and general manager of that expedition I did not want to have a joint debate every time I made a move.

My first tickets took us to a junction point. Then I bought to Chicago.

The judge went along silently, showing about as much interest as a mummy in me, or in the scenery or people. I suppose the old fellow was having a terrible struggle with his fears, his thoughts, and his recollection of the manner in which he had parted from his family. I sympathized with him and left him alone. Once in a while I got a side-glance from him which suggested that he had not abandoned his distrust of me. Perhaps he pondered that he was simply submitting to another form of self-destruction and was willing to let it go at that!

I’ll confess this: I was taking so much interest in the world about me that I was finding it hard to concentrate my thoughts on the business we had in hand. I had done no railroad-riding to speak of till then. It seemed as unreal as if I were headed for the moon instead of into the far vastness of my native land. When we went rolling through the smoky fringes of Chicago and I saw that there really was a Chicago, my emotion, as I remember it, was astonishment. But I had already found out that a greenhorn could get along pretty well by watching other folks and by asking questions.

So we crowded into the transfer-wagon on Polk Street and were quickly across the city to another railroad station, where I bought tickets for St. Paul. Before the train pulled out I raided a folder-stand and grabbed a sample of everything in the rack.

I went into those folders like a girl diving into the love scenes in a mush novel; I studied as diligently as if I were a prize pupil getting ready for a contest. I had my nose in those papers for hours, till I could close my eyes and see maps and repeat time-tables and names of cities backward.

So I wasn’t at a loss when we reached St. Paul. I trotted the judge right along to a window and bought tickets for Spokane. He was mumbling a monotone of growls in my ear while I counted out the money.

“Look here, young man,” he said, when we had left the window, “I am not going to be teamed any farther until you tell me exactly where you are going and what you are intending to do.”

It rather surprised me to hear him speak; I had sort of forgotten that he could talk.

“Do you pretend that you expect to get money, racing around like this?”

“I’m on the trail of it, Judge Kingsley—your money, you remember. I’m not doing this for my own amusement.”

“You seem to be; I’ve been watching you, sir. You are plainly relishing this junketing about. I go no farther.”

“How much money have you in your pocket?” I asked, mildly.

He looked alarmed. “I did not bring money! You took the money for expenses, you said. I depended on that. I have only a few dollars.”

“That’s good,” I told him. “So there’s no chance for argument here on this platform.” I waved the tickets under his nose. “I reckon you’ll have to stick right along with me, sir, wherever I go.”

That settled that rebellion!

When I started toward the train he followed. His face was white, his jaws were ridged, and he was furious—but his anger locked his lips. He did not bother me with questions. That night I hid my money inside my berth-pillow; by the way the judge looked at me I knew he would pick my pocket if he got a chance.

On we went across the prairies of the Dakotas—and the journey was not interesting. It was all dun and dull and brown and monotonous in that late March. When the sun shone it only showed up more of the raw country. Every little while we went plunging through a snow-squall which plastered the car windows and speckled the brown of the prairie.

Then the doldrums got me! All at once I found myself bluer than the old judge had been, even in his deepest despondency. This was a reckless escapade, not a sensible man’s project! I had bragged and blustered and made promises there in that little tin dipper of a Levant where the horizon was pinched in by Mitchell’s Mountain and Tumbledick Hill. I had got by with my bluff in the wood-lot game and had felt as if I were a big man!

But out there!

No longer was it a string of mere names and a smudge of color on paper to make a map! I was looking out, hour by hour, on the reality of the vastness of the great West. As to the men I was hunting for in that wide expanse—those fly-by-nighters, those human skip-bugs—would they not be dodging where impulse took them? Jeff Dawlin was a mere gambler—willing to take a chance on anything. Had he not taken a mere gambler’s chance on my finding those men? If I succeeded he would get his pay. If I did not succeed it was only my failure—he had invested nothing—he had no interest in my affairs, except a gambler’s.

And what could I do to those men if I did find them? They were at home out there—as much at home as they were in the East. The farther out on those prairies I rolled, the farther away from all confidence in myself I seemed to be. Old Ariock Blake used to say that sometimes he felt as if he were “forty miles from water and a hundred miles from land.” I felt just as helplessly up in the air as that! I fairly wallowed in sloppy gloom.

To sit there in front of Zebulon Kingsley in my state of mind and courage and look on his gad-awful sourness of visage was too much for my nerves.

I went to get a drink of water and heard men laughing in the smoking-room. If there were men in the world who could laugh I wanted to be with them. So I went in. They were playing poker, and after a time one man had to leave the train and they asked me into the game.

I was desperate enough to grab at anything that would take my mind off my troubles, so I began to play poker. And when a man sits in to play poker with strangers it’s a mighty small slice of mind he has left to blotter worry with.

I was away from the judge a long time, and he came hunting me up and caught me at the pastime. Perhaps he feared that his two-legged bank had fallen off the train and he had been worrying; but when he saw me with cards in my hand and money spread out he had a lot more to worry about and his face showed it. He let out of him a sort of moan and went away.

“Your father?” asked one of the men, casually. “Sick?”

“Yes,” I said. “I mean he’s sick, but he’s not my father. He is a big Eastern capitalist I’m escorting West on business.”

“Put me next—I can offer him some great chances,” said another man.

“I’m afraid he is feeling too bad to talk business—and he is very notional in the matter of strangers. Don’t say anything to him; leave it to me.” I was obliged to say something about the judge and to block them from bothering him, if I could, for I knew he would not be contented with one inspection of me at my devilish and dangerous occupation. “Don’t pay any attention to his actions,” I advised. “He’s feeling mighty sick—a long ride makes him sort of seasick.”

I was glad I had planted something with the men, for the judge kept coming and sticking his head between the curtains and making strange noises. He went at me in good earnest when he had me at table in the dining-car.

“How dare you throw away my money on gamblers?”

“I haven’t done so, Judge Kingsley.”

“I saw you doing it in that dirty den of smoke and vice.”

“You saw me playing cards, I’ll admit. I had to do something to keep from going crazy.”

“Tossing away my money! Gambling my dollars—”

“Just a moment, sir! That money is a part of my profits and I consider it a common pot for both of us. I know how to play poker. I have added forty-five dollars to it.”

“Do you boast that you have been cheating at cards to help me?”

Confound him! he could sting a man with that tongue of his!

“A man can play poker without cheating. Just as a man can do business without cheating!”

I looked him in the eye and he shut up. I had found out that I could get along with him better when he didn’t talk. After the meal I went back to the game. I felt that every little helped, provided I could hold my own.

I couldn’t resist a quiet chuckle inside when I reflected that I was industriously playing cards for the benefit of Judge Zebulon Kingsley, Sunday-school superintendent of Levant.

I had learned long before how to watch out in a card game, and when I felt little scratches on the backs of the cards and observed that one of the players was doing the gouge act with a specially manicured finger-nail, I turned a few tricks of my own. I felt the full humor of the thing when I calmed my conscience with the thought that it was all for the sake of the judge. When he came to the curtains and glared at me I grinned at him.

I cleaned up one hundred and fifteen dollars, at any rate, before we rolled into Spokane—and I had at least five hundred dollars’ worth of respite from my bitter misgivings. When I showed that tainted money to the judge with some little pride and impelled by a spirit of devilishness I couldn’t control, I thought for a moment that he would bite me.

“I’m not going to associate any longer with a scalawag. I’m not going to be bullyragged by a scoundrel!”

“However, when we’re roaming we’ve got to do as the roamers do,” I told him. Deep in me I was ashamed of the disrespect I was showing him by plaguing him in that fashion, but I felt an almost irresistible hankering to do it; he had so long lorded it in Levant. Furthermore, he did not seem to recognize in any manner my spirit of self-sacrifice; he had not shown to me one flash of wholehearted gratitude. I may have had a cloudy notion that he needed to have his spirit of Kingsley pride humbled before he would ever consider me as a likely son-in-law. My ideas then and the memories of my ideas now are not very clear, for I was not in any very calm and philosophic mood those days.

After a carriage had snatched us across Spokane and we were landed on the platform of a station from which trains for the Idaho country departed, he did buck in good earnest.

He was a man of plan and method; he had passed his life in routine. That rattle-brained gallop must have offended every instinct in him.

“I’ll not get on that train. I’ll go no farther. I’ll appeal to the police,” he raved. “Give me my share of that money and I’ll go home.”

“I have mixed it all together—gambling money and all! I would not have you traveling on gambling money, Judge.” My pertness added to his anger.

“I’ll have you arrested, so help me—”

“Hold on before you put the binding word to that oath, Judge Kingsley. If you dare to put me in the jug away out here away from home, I’ll yank you in as an embezzler of town money—and I’ve got an uncle who is first selectman of the town! A little telegraphing will do the trick. Now let’s both of us throw away our bombs. The fuses are sizzling! Climb aboard.”

He ground his teeth and climbed!

A fine sort of a brindled, cross-eyed hen was I setting to hatch my son-in-law hopes! But a mood of recklessness was sweeping me then.

I did not buy tickets; I paid cash fares to the conductor, naming a station I culled from the folder. I was not sure what the limits of the Potlatch country were; I proposed to drop in with somebody on the train, if I could manage it discreetly, and post myself by asking questions.

I saw no likely subjects in the car where we were riding—the passengers were mostly women—so I slicked up my silk hat, fixed it at a confident and compelling angle, and went out into the smoking-car.

As I have just said, the spirit of recklessness was flaming in me. I did not dare to let it die down. I lashed my courage and my craziness both together. I was bitterly afraid I might drop back into that paralyzing despondency I had felt back there on the Dakota prairies. That meant that I would become a useless quitter. Only by dint of holding myself in that desperate mood where I proposed to let chance have its way with me, and to grab in on anything that offered, would I have gone through so brazenly with the affair on which I soon found myself entering. It was merely another gamble, it seemed to me after I was in it. It was taking my mind off my more private affairs, even as the poker game had distracted my attention.

I marched through to the front of the smoking-car where the train-boy was arranging his little stock, bought a paper, and walked slowly back up the aisle with a glance to right and left at the faces of the men, hoping to get a rise from that “likely subject” I was hunting for.

One man returned my glance with interest.

After I sat down, well up in the car, I looked over the top of the newspaper and saw that the stranger’s interest in me continued. The chap had a broad face, liquor-mottled. After a while he unscrewed the top of a flask and sucked in a long drink. Then he worked his shoulders, jerked at the bottom of his waistcoat, wriggled his arms, and displayed other symptoms of a man who is trying to brace up and to pull himself together. At last he derricked himself out of his seat and swayed up the car aisle. He divided glances between my plug-hat and the frock-coat.

“Excuse me, but it’s the clothes,” said the stranger.

I nodded amiably.

“I wouldn’t butt in and speak to you if it wasn’t for the clothes.”

Once more I was having it impressed on me that a plug-hat and a frock-coat seemed to be good reliable openers in the jack-pot of chance. I reckoned I’d play the hand.

“You’re not a parson.”

“I’m far from it, sir.”

“The farthest from it I know is to be a lawyer. I spotted you for a lawyer. If you are one I want to talk with you.”

“I’m a lawyer. Sit down,” was my cheerful lie.

The stranger hauled out his flask. “Do you ever indulge?”

“No.”

“So much the better. Lawyers ought to keep their brains cool. Seeing that you’ve got the brains and propose to keep ’em cool, I’ve got to keep up my nerve—and so I’ll take a drink.” He sucked at the flask again. “Where do you live?”

“In the East.”

“Then you don’t know this country and the laws out in this section,” said the stranger, showing his disappointment.

“Oh yes, I do; I used to live out here. That’s why I happen to be here now. I’m investigating investments for Eastern capital.”

My new acquaintance leaned dose, so close that his whisky-saturated breath left vapor on my cheeks.

“I have found out something that’s big. I thought I could handle it myself. I have started out to handle it myself. But when I saw you I said to myself, ‘There’s a squire, and he knows law and probably his brains are cooler than mine.’ I’ve got the secret and I’ve got the grit, but I need law, too—and I ain’t sure of all the fine points. I want you to come along with me and stand at my back and hand me the fine points as I need ’em. What do you charge per day for peddling law?”

“I’ll have to know what the deal is first.”

“Can’t tell you.”

I was getting a little shaky on the proposition and raised the paper in front of my face and appeared to lose interest in matters of law. After a time the red-faced individual tapped on the paper with his knuckle, as one would tap on a door. I pulled my shield to one side.

“A chap hates to let go of a big thing to a stranger, even if that stranger is a lawyer. I have walked past a dozen law-offices without daring to go in. Perhaps you don’t realize what a big thing I’ve got. Now listen here! Suppose you were a fellow like I am—a prospector—and was digging around the record-books, looking up land titles, mineral grants, and so forth, and got on to a trail that you followed up and found that a new city had been laid out and lots sold off and buildings going up, and all that—all on a location that wasn’t legal? Mind you, I ain’t naming any place. But it’s on a section that land-grabbers got hold of a long time ago. And they were such hungry land-grabbers that they stretched lines to take in everything that was loose around those parts. There was no one to make any holler about it. It was just so much extra land and it didn’t look like real money.”

“I have so much business of my own that I’m not interested in making guesses at the business of somebody else,” I remarked. I was in that thing about as deep as I wanted to be.

“But how do I know anything about you?”

“Honors are even!”

The stranger knuckled his forehead, trying to think.

“I don’t want to trig the best thing I ever got hold of in my life because I didn’t buy a little law for to grease the runway,” he said at last. “I may as well tell you—without giving out names and places—that those land-grabbers hooked in a section that belonged to a soldiers’ grant—and that’s why no one ever made a holler. There don’t seem to be any particular heirs to side-tracked soldiers’ grants that have never been thought worth much. No timber, you see; only plain land. But plain land is mighty good property when a railroad takes a notion to build on to it and comes to an end there and a city starts.” The client began to show excitement. “They have laid out lots and built and they haven’t got straight title. I have found it out.”

“That doesn’t seem reasonable,” I said. “Railroads and men who are building cities do not make such mistakes.”

“But they have this time. The same money that grabbed the land has built the railroad. They think they have got it all buttoned up. They didn’t want to expose themselves by starting a movement to make their title straight. They reckon they’ll be able to bluff it out with money and pull and influence down to Boise. That will be easier than to chase around and establish title to a soldiers’ grant. But, by thunder! they can’t stretch or shrink the hide of old earth! There are set points that have got to be measured from and the measurements will tell the story. And re-locations will have to stand—for the law of the United States can’t be built over when the holler is made.”

I guess I didn’t show much interest—I was afraid to show any. I hoped the man would shut up and go away.

“Don’t you believe what I am telling you?” he demanded.

“I am merely wondering how it comes about that you know so much, more than everybody else about a section of land that has been surveyed for a railroad and a new city.”

“My father was a pioneer in this country. One day, after they began to build the railroad, I was in the record-office and happened to remember some of the things he told me about the days when they were grabbing land in these parts. I looked up records, I did measuring, I did some reckoning, and within the last two days I have made sure that I’ve got the bind on the city of Breed.”

In his excitement he spat out the name. Then he promptly began to damn himself. “I never ought to take a drink of liquor,” he declared. “But when it came to me that I could run in there and re-locate the best hunk of that land, I reckoned I needed to have my nerve with me, and so I’ve been bracing my nerve. But the trouble with me is, when my nerve is braced my tongue is loose. Now I suppose I’ve got to take you in! But I’m dangerous. However, I’ll take you in.”

I didn’t say anything.

“What do you get a day for your best law work?”

“I don’t work by the day.” I wondered just how lawyers did work.

“Well, then, name your price for standing by me against the sharks they’ll bring to try to beat me out. I don’t know anything about hiring lawyers.”

“I’ll take half.” I thought that remark would send him hipering away.

My client’s face promptly showed the color of a ripe damson. He tried to say something and merely clucked. After a struggle he managed to control his temper and his voice. He leaned forward and clutched my knees. He spoke low, for there were other passengers near, but the rasp in his tones made up for any lack of emphasis.

“My name is Peter Dragg. If you have never heard of me, ask somebody about me. Ask any one between Buffalo Hump and Cour d’Alene. I’ve had a lot of practice in doing things to men who have got in my way. What I’ll do to you if you don’t back up will put red rings around the moon.”

“Well, then, consider I’m discharged!”

“From what?”

“From my position as your lawyer.”

“I haven’t hired you.”

“Then suppose you cast off those grappling-hooks,” I suggested, for his clutch on my knees hurt my flesh and my feelings. When he did not let go, I reached down slowly, grabbed his hands and began to pry.

Not a man about us noticed what was going on—the newspaper that I had dropped covered our hands. It was tense and silent testing out which was the better man in that clinch. He had a handsome little grip of his own, I’ll admit, but I had diver’s hooks at the ends of my arms and I bested him.

“I quit!” he growled, after a time. “Leave go!”

“Listen,” said I. “I’m not a lawyer.”

“You lie!”

“I did lie, but not now. You pass on about your business.”

“It isn’t my own business any longer—I have put you wise to it.”

“But I’m forgetting it. I have plenty else on my mind.”

“You don’t get past with that kind of bluff,” he sneered. “You intend to beat me to it, but you can’t.”

“Look here, I’m coming across square with you,” I protested. “You came and jammed a lot of information on to me. I didn’t ask for it.”

“I say you coaxed it out of me. Now you’ve got to come in and give me law on a decent lay. If you don’t I’ll do you!”

“I’m not a lawyer.”

“I know better! You’re tied up with me—you’ve got to stick to me.”

“But I have important matters which will take all my time.”

“I’ll take your time from now on.”

“Look here! I propose to go on and mind my own business!”

“Then you’re spoken for! I’ll tend to you before you get a chance to butt in on my business.”

He leaned back in his seat and pushed his coat aside, inviting my attention by a downward glance.

He was packing a gun on each hip’.

“I’ll give you about ten minutes’ recess to think the thing over,” he stated. “If you try to leave this train I’ll be after you!”

He went down the car, turned over a scat, and faced me.

I was in a fine way to attend to the business of Judge Kingsley and myself! Whether I went into that fellow’s scheme or did not go in, it seemed all the same. In those days, according to what I had read, they were very careless about handling firearms in some parts of the West, and it looked to me as if I had dropped into one of those sections. He took another pull from his flask. The uncertainty of what that intoxicated gentleman might feel impelled to do to me next, in the confusion of his fuddlement, made the shivers run up and down my back. In the ten anxious minutes that passed he pulled that flask four times, and every time he reached for it I made a motion to dodge under the seat. The damnable part of it was that nobody in the car was paying the least attention to us.

Then he came tottering up the aisle and lurched into the seat in front of me. Between two hiccups he sandwiched a threatening, “Well?” Plainly, he was well “pickled” and accordingly dangerous. And, on the other hand, there was a hope for me in his condition. I concluded I might as well be shot as scared to death. I couldn’t draw a deep breath as long as those guns were on him.

“Well, what say?” he repeated.

“It’s all right!” I mumbled. “But let’s make it private. Listen! I’ll whisper!” I leaned forward, sliding both hands along his legs, getting close to his ear. I laid hands on both weapons and jerked myself back, holding them low at my hips.

“Make one move and I’ll bore you,” I growled. “Go back to your seat. Go quick!”

He went. I tucked the guns into my own pockets.

We passed the station to which I had paid fares, and I handed more money to the conductor. I decided to stay on the train, hoping that my client would arrive at his home town, whatever it was, and get off. But he kept right on.

After a time he held up a handkerchief by one corner and waggled it, giving me a drunken and moist wink. Evidently he wanted further conference under a flag of truce, and I nodded agreement after I had made sure that the guns could be come at easily. I agreed because I hoped I could make some sensible arrangement to get rid of this particular bottle imp who had landed himself on to my affairs.

“You think you’re a slick one, eh?” My hopes fell, for his tone did not suggest compromise. “You’d better turn around and go back. You’re heading into the wrong country. Will you go back?”

“What is the country?”

“Thought you said you used to live out this way!”

“I say, what is the country you’re speaking of?”

“The Potlatch section,” he growled. “You’d better not get as far as that. You know Shan Benson, don’t you?”

“Maybe!”

“You know Ive Hacker, Binn Mingo, Cole Wass—all friends of mine!”

“What about it?”

“Pals, I say! All work together. Pull off our plays together.”

“Go ahead!”

“Go ahead!” he repeated, grinding his teeth. “We’ll go ahead and make a pot roast of you in that plug-hat! Do you think I’m a lone-hander, without friends? Haven’t you ever heard of Steer Bingham?”

My heart jumped. That was the of the names Jeff Dawlin had written down for me.

“And I suppose you’re holding out Ike Dawlin for a—” I started, giving him a sharp look.

He smacked his hand on his knee. “Yes, Ike Dawlin. That’s the kind of friends I’ve got who will—”

“A fine bunch to be afraid of if they all are as handy by as Ike Dawlin!”

He stared at me.

“Ike Dawlin is East on a gold-brick game, and you know it,” I said.

“East—East—you plug-hat stiff! I’ll show you whether he’s East or not!”

“He is East along with ‘Peacock’ Pratt.”

My cocksureness made him furious.

“By the jumped-up jeesicks, don’t you suppose I know when Ike Dawlin lands back in the Potlatch country?”

“I’ll have to see him to believe it. Yes, or ‘Peacock’ Pratt!”

“You follow along on my heels and you’ll see both of ’em all right! Next you’ll claim to be a friend of theirs, eh?”

“Oh no! If I really thought Ike Dawlin was in the Potlatch instead of back East I wouldn’t be headed this way. There’s one special man I wouldn’t want to meet up with.”

Mr. Dragg bounced up and down on the seat in his rage. I had prodded him as hard as I could in order to make sure that he knew what he was talking about.

“Damn you!” he snorted. “Then you’ll get your dose of Ike Dawlin. I won’t eat nor sleep till I find him. And he’ll burn up the road getting to you. Ike Dawlin, eh? You don’t dare to come on!”

“Keep your eye on me. But if you can dig up Ike Dawlin in these parts come around and I’ll hand you a present—maybe I’ll hand back your guns!”

Mr. Dragg by that time was not a pleasant companion and I got up and went back through the train. He started after me, and then thought better of it. Probably he reflected that he had me either way. If I got frightened and went back he would be well rid of me as a rival in his scheme; if I came on he had Dawlin and the rest—and I surely believed his word about Dawlin’s whereabouts. I did not know whether I was mighty glad that my chase was being guided in such handsome manner or was so dreadfully scared by the prospects just ahead of me that I was half minded to jump off the train; my feelings were very much mixed up.

However, when I met the gloomy stare of Zebulon Kingsley I grinned—I couldn’t help it. There was a lot of grim humor in the situation.

“Been raking in more dirty money, I suppose,” he snarled, mistaking the nature of my smile.

“No, I have turned a better trick, sir. I have just met up with the most obliging chap I have found in a long time. He knows the man who fooled you into buying that gold brick. He is going to find him for us!”

“Bah!” sneered the judge. “This is only a wild, crazy, helter-skelter chase for—”

“I’m telling you the truth, sir! I never saw a man so enthusiastic about a kindness for strangers! He just told me that he wouldn’t eat or sleep till he had found that fellow. Why, he is so headlong about the thing that I’m afraid he’ll find the chap before we’re ready to meet him in proper style!”

“Hump!” sneered the judge, not taking a mite of stock in me.

I walked away and sat down by myself. There was sad truth in what I just told Kingsley. I was not ready to meet Ike Dawlin and “Peacock” Pratt.