The cabin on Spit-Cat Creek lies lonely among the high pastures, and looks down to further loneliness across many slanting levels of pine-tops. These descend successively in smooth, odorous, evergreen miles until they reach the open valley. Here runs the stage road, if you can discern it, from the railway to the continuously jubilant cow-town of Likely, Wyoming; and here, when viewed from the cabin through a field-glass, you can readily distinguish an antelope from a stone in the clear atmosphere which commonly prevails. The windows of the cabin are three, and looking in through any of them you can see the stove, the table, and the ingenuous structure which does duty as a bed. During the season of snow, from November until May, the cabin (in the days of which I speak) was dwelt in by no one; while through the open weather some person of honesty and resource would be sent thither from the headquarters ranch on Sunk Creek two or three times, to stay no longer than his duties required, and to come back with his report as soon as they should be performed. Such a man would live here with canned food and the small stove, seldom having other company than his own, and, if he had ears for the music of nature, the singing pines would often companion him, he could hear now and again some unseen bird crying as it passed among them, and always the voice of Spit-Cat. This stream foamed by the cabin to fall and wander deviously away into the great, distant silence of the mountains. Likely was eighteen miles distant, and to this place the man could ride in four hours by a recently discovered trail, which was the shorter one, and followed the smaller tributary stream of Spit-Kitten; and sometimes the man did so ride for his mail, or for more canned food, or for a game of chance and female company, in the continuously jubilant cow-town of Likely, Wyoming.

Upon a midday in June, had you secretly peered through any of the windows in the cabin, you could have seen a seated man, tightly curved over the table and apparently dying in convulsions brought on by poison; for the signs of a newly finished meal were near him. There was a coffee-pot, and a dish of bacon, and three quarters of a pie. But it was merely Scipio Le Moyne endeavoring to write a letter; and no task more excruciating was known to this young man.

“Dear friend,” he had begun, “i got no dictionery, but—”

At this point a heavy blot had intervened as he was changing the personal pronoun into a capital I.

“Oh, gosh!” he sighed, and for a while could spell no more. He sat back, staring at the paper. “It’s not to a girl,” he presently muttered. “I guess I’ll not start a fresh sheet.” And while the perspiring Scipio laid his nose to his pen and dragged himself onward from word to word, a bad old gentleman with a black coat and a white beard was coming stealthily up from the valley through the thick pines. He was still some miles away, and he meant to look in at one of the windows, and regulate his conduct according to what he should then see. He was by no means sure that Scipio had what he wanted, which was as much money as he could get, or any fraction thereof; but he had a shrewd suspicion that he could ascertain this without any extreme use of deadly weapons.

Scipio Le Moyne was making his first stay in the Spit-Cat cabin, and in his mind there welled a complacency not to be justified; for when a thick roll of money is in a man’s trousers, and the man’s trousers are upon the man, and the man is writing a letter at a table, you see at once how unsafe the money is if the man’s six-shooter is lying out of reach on the bed behind him. It should be hanging at his hip, or in the armhole of his waistcoat, or stuck elsewhere handily about his immediate person. And so it would have been on any ordinary day of Scipio’s life; but alas! on this day he was writing a letter, and was therefore not quite accountable. There were many things that he did not enjoy—cooking, for example, or a bucking pony, or gun trouble in a saloon; but these worries he could usually meet. The only crisis which invariably disturbed him (except, of course, having to talk to Eastern ladies when they visited the Judge’s ranch) was to be face to face with ink and a pen. After his midday meal this noon he had reclined upon his bed, putting off the hateful moment. Thus recumbent he had unbuckled his belt for comfort and got none, for the letter made him restless. At length, with a mind absent from everything save the coming ink and pen, he had gone to them, forgetting his revolver among the rumpled blankets.

Complacency welled in his mind because of errands accomplished. He had been trusted, and he had a pride in it deeper than any words he was willing to utter, and a gratitude which he would express by inference alone. He would do everything that they had given him to do so well that it could not be done better; that is how he would thank his friend, the Sunk Creek foreman, for giving him this chance to show his abilities—and his radical honesty. (Scipio was not in the least honest on the surface.) He would take no man’s word for an inch of the work that he had been sent to oversee on both sides of the mountain; he would visit the various camps when he was not expected; every cow to be bought should be bought on his own inspection and not on the seller’s assurances. But these trusts were little compared with the heavy wages that he was carrying to pay off certain men when certain work should be finished. He had hoped to be rid of this at once, but late snows and high water had delayed the work.

Scipio Le Moyne was among the newcomers at the headquarters ranch on Sunk Creek. His character had not yet been tested by a year’s scrutiny. He was known to ride and rope well, and to cook indifferently, and to return from town having behaved himself less ill than the worst; but Judge Henry had drawn back from putting in his hands a temptation so potent as the wages. Much ready money is a burning argument for a disappearance. To these cautious sentiments of the Judge his foreman had replied scarcely more than “I have studied Scipio mighty thorough.” To Scipio himself, the friend for whose character he was thus pledging his good judgment, he merely remarked, “Stay with the money.”

“Stay with it!” exclaimed Scipio, nearly overcome by his feelings. He wanted to hug the foreman; and lest his eyes should betray something, he narrowed them to a wicked slit, and put on the disguise of jocularity. “If y’u say so, I’ll stay with it till I come home with it.”

The usually sharp-witted foreman was at a loss.

“Sure!” Scipio explained. “I’ll pay the boys what they’re owed, and take ’em into Likely and win it back off ’em. Why, it’s the kind of plan y’u might think of yourself.”

“You’re cert’nly shameless,” murmured the foreman.

“So my enemies all say,” retorted Scipio. Thus had he departed to Sunk Creek.

And now, having done well most things he was sent to do, his heart was so grateful to his friend that he would conquer his distaste for the pen, and write a long letter without a single word of thanks in it—the thanks would merely be between every line. The truly heavy load of responsibility was still with him, but safe with him; that money would go into the hands of the men at the Flat Iron outfit to-morrow, and surprise them. Had he not been adroit? No one suspected he was the paymaster. Visiting Likely once for his mail and some supplies, he had been obliged to spend the night there. His prudence as to whiskey and general abstemiousness of conduct that night might point, he feared, to the fact that he carried money he was “staying with.” He even felt a certain observation to attend his movements. He therefore began to speak deceitfully to the company he sat among. Had anybody else, he inquired, been through here from Sunk Creek? Nobody else had, it appeared; and Scipio smoked for a while.

“Well,” he remarked at length, with a certain gloom, like one who speaks from an offended heart, “a man don’t enjoy bein’ mistrusted. Not if there’s never been nothing to justify it.” He said no more, waiting for some one to draw the desired inference from this utterance.

After a matter of some five minutes the inference was appreciated, and he received a counter-offer, so to speak, a trifle too obviously aimed. “Them hands at the Flat Iron,” said the offerer, “has most finished their job, ain’t they?”

“I don’t know about them,” said Scipio, keeping in the land of inference. “I’ve finished mine, I know.” Then, after a proper pause and with proper bitterness, he finished: “If folks can’t trust me they can’t hire me.”

It was lightly handled, and it did its work in Likely. All Likely gossiped next day about how Judge Henry would not let Scipio handle the Flat Iron money, and how Scipio let his feelings be shown too plain for self-respect—all Likely, save one close observer. The old gentleman with the black coat and the white beard thought that it was odd in Scipio to behave so carefully during his night in town, odd and interesting to drink nothing and go to bed early in the hotel. “That kind don’t,” he said to himself; “not usually when they’re mad at their employer and goin’ to quit their job.” The old gentleman did not gossip, but grew thoughtful. One morning he got on his old pink mare, and took a quiet trail for Spit-Cat. He thought he knew the way, but lost himself, and luckily met a man on the stage road who directed him up the old, established trail. Or rather, it was lucky that he lost himself, else he would have arrived before Scipio had unbuckled his pistol and forgotten everything in the world but this letter he was knee-deep in.

“Dear friend I got no dictionery but if any of my spelling raises your suspicions you can borrow a dictionery at your end and theirby correct my statements which are otherwise garranteed to be strictly accurite. Hope you are well I am same. Have a good notion not to sine this for you will know my tracks without more information. Well buisniss first and I will try run in a little pleasure for you if my nerve holds out but that blot will tell you I am not myself just now. You said I was shameless but you are dead wrong about me. To think of the way you lied to those poor boys about the frogs has made me blush in bed after many a day when my own concience was at piece. I have looked after the new ditches I had to attend to them a whole lot they are all right now but they were not the young yellowleg who calls himself a civil engineer I guess because he looks at a grade through a machine on three sticks instead of with his naked eye was making trouble. He was arranging for the water from Crow Canyon to run up hill. We got it started the right way yesterday but that civil engineer does too much fingering with his pencil to suit me he has a whole box full of sums in arrithmetic. The fences are satisfactory. I was oblidged to turn half the cattle back the man thought I was one of those who do not know a cow when they see one but he has gone home realizing his poor judgment. And now that is all except I am paying off the extra hands at the Flat Iron outfit to-morrow or next day sure and now for pleasure as my hand has got limbered up wonderful and no longer oblidged to blast out every word with giant powder like I had to all around the start where you see those blots. I guess the words are going to get to chasing each other off this pen before I am through telling you something.

“I have noticed a thing. Be the first to tell a joke on yourself it deadens the blow. Well Honey Wiggin has found out about this so I am going to hurry up and get ahead of his news. Likely is the town here as you know and twenty hours is still the record for driving to it from the railroad but there is a new trail from here to Likely by Spit-Kitten it saves an hour so I am living an hour nearer the fashion than you told me I would be when you gave me this job. But it was by no means to be fashionable that I had to go over to Likely though it is a good place for a man who wants to and this cabin is not fashionable a little bit but my flour gave out. The last of it was eat up by Honey Wiggin who stopped here one night and told me about the trail by Spit-Kitten witch he claimed was easy except in one place by what they call the Little Pasture. You come on the fence on the side hill up among the trees where they have been cut down some and Honey said follow the fence a good ways maybe three miles he thought but not more and you would see the place where the trail took off down the hill through the same kind of trees pretty thin growing and pines mostly till you would come to the edge and see the town down below about half an hour more riding. Honey went over the mountain to Flat Iron and I caught up my horse and started for Likely. The trail was all right unless for a horse packed heavy and I did not hurry any for I knew I had the night to put in in town and I was in no haste to get there because I could have no enjoyment when I did on account of the money. I was invited a lot when I got there but though I have been going to bed the same day I got up for many weeks I was taking no risk. But that is not my point it is the Little Pasture I want to speak of. It got shady while I was following the fence which I struck all right but I did not mind and I was studying up something to tell any folks that might inquire about the money for Flat Iron for I have to practiss lying I am not quick at it like you. Well sir I went along getting up some remarks and then picking out them I considered to be the most promissing but after a while I says to myself it must be most three miles I have come along this fence. But Honey Wiggin is not special close about distances, and so I went along rejecting some of the remarks I had picked out and putting stronger ones in their place and pretty soon I knew I must have come five miles anyway for Japan can walk three miles an hour and I had looked at my watch. I made Japan lope and then I made him gallup and then something struck me like a flash and I got off him and I tied my hankerchef to the fence and me and Japan gallupped like we was both crazy and it was not twenty minnits till we came round to my hankerchef again. I expect the pasture is three miles round but cannot say how many times I circled her. I struck out for myself then and come to another fence and that was the one Honey meant, only he says now he told me to look out and not take the first fence.

“In Likely I went to bed the same day I got up and I slept in my pants with the money and can say I will be glad when—”

Here Scipio Le Moyne looked up from his letter, for the old gentleman stood in the door and wished him good morning. It was not morning, but let that go. The old gentleman had taken his observations through the window behind Scipio and had been much pleased to notice the six-shooter among the blankets. He had observed everything: the pie, the letter, all things inside the cabin, and also that outside the cabin Scipio’s horse was grazing in the little field, and therefore not instantly serviceable. His own animal he had tied to a tree a little distance within the timber.

“Good morning,” he said.

Scipio’s entire inward arrangements gave a monstrous leap, but his outward start was very slight. “Hello, Uncle Pasco!” said he cheerfully. “Are y’u lost?” And he sat in his chair quite still.

Uncle Pasco stood blinking in his usual way. “No,” he returned. “Not lost. Just off trappin’. That’s what.” His voice was an old man’s, dry and chirping, and his sentences proceeded in short hops. He had seen Scipio’s one-quarter inch of movement, and he read that movement with admirable insight: it had been a quickly arrested and choked impulse to get to those blankets. And Scipio had done some reading, too. He saw Uncle Pasco’s eye measuring distances, and he could discern no sign whatever of pistol upon the old gentleman. This rendered him extremely cautious, and his thoughts worked at a remarkable speed. Uncle Pasco did not have to think so quickly, for he had begun his meditations in Likely several days ago, and they were all finished as far as they could be up to the present juncture. Even the most ripened strategist must leave some moves to be determined by the fluctuations of the battle.

“Been off trapping’,” repeated Uncle Pasco.

“What luck?” Scipio inquired.

“Poor. Poor. Beaver gettin’ cleaned out of this country. That’s what.”

“Better sit down and eat,” said Scipio. “Take your coat off and stay a while.”

Uncle Pasco’s glance rested on the pie a moment, and then upon Scipio’s ink-covered sheets. “M—well,” he said doubtfully, for Scipio’s ease had now put him in doubt, “I got to get back to Likely. Pie looks good. Pie like mother made. That’s what. M—well, you’re busy. Guess you want to write your letter.”

Scipio now looked at his letter, and drew inspiration from it, a forlorn hope of inspiration. “Why, you don’t need to start for Likely so soon,” he remarked with a persuasive whine. “What was the use in stoppin’ at all? Eat the balance of the pie and take the new trail—if your packs are not loaded heavy.”

“Spit-Kitten?” said Uncle Pasco.

“Yep,” said Scipio. “Saves an hour.”

“Ain’t been over it,” said Uncle Pasco.

“Can’t miss it,” said Scipio. “Your pack’s light?”

“M—well,” answered Uncle Pasco, doubtfully, “fairly light.”

“Sit down,” said Scipio. “I’ll tell y’u about the trail while you’re eatin’ the pie.” He made as if to rise and offer the only chair in the room to Uncle Pasco. This brought Uncle Pasco immediately to his side.

“Keep a-sittin’,” the old gentleman urged. “Keep a-sittin’, and draw me a map. That’s what. Map of Spit-Kitten.”

“Here,” began Scipio, wriggling his pen across a blank sheet, “runs Spit-Cat. This here cross is this cabin. Stream’s runnin’ this way. Understand?”

“That’s plain,” said Uncle Pasco.

“Here,” and Scipio wriggled his pen at right angles to the first wriggle, “comes Spit-Kitten into the main creek—right above this cabin. See? Well. Now.” Scipio began dotting lines. “You follow the little creek up, so. Then you cross over to the left bank, so. And you go right up out of a little canyon (you can’t if your packs is heavy loaded, for it’s awful steep and slippery for pretty near a hundred yards) and you come out on top clear going—gosh! I’ve got to take another sheet of paper—well, now y’u go down easy a mile or two and keep swinging to your right, and about here”—Scipio now sprinkled some points on the paper—“the trees begin gettin’ scattery and you look out for a fence on your left. You follow that fence for—well, I’d not say whether it’s three miles or four—it’s that noo pasture the Seventy-six outfit calls their Little Pasture, and before y’u come to the corner where there’s a gate by a gushin’ creek I don’t know the name of, you’ll notice the hill goin’ down to your right all over good grass and mighty few trees, and if it’s dark you’ll see the lights of the town below and the trail takes off right about where you’ll be standing this way” (Scipio scratched an arrow), “and don’t y’u mind if it looks like a little-worn trail, for that’s the way it is, and y’u can’t miss it on that hillside. See?”

“That’s plain as day,” said Uncle Pasco, accepting the two sheets of the map and sliding them into his own pocket. He still stood beside Scipio, irresolutely, considering the lumpy appearance of Scipio’s pocket. A handkerchief with a bag of tobacco might produce such a bulge.

“Fine day,” said Scipio. “Better stay a while.”

“Good weather right along now,” said Uncle Pasco.

“Time it was,” said Scipio, “after the wettin’ the month of May gave us. Boys doin’ anything in town lately?”

“Oh, gay, gay,” returned Uncle Pasco. And he ran a pistol against Scipio’s head. “Out with it,” he commanded. “Cough up.”

It is possible, under these circumstances, to refuse to cough, and to perform instead some rapid athletics which result in a bullet-hole in the wall or ceiling, to be forever after pointed to. But the odds are so heavy that the hole will be in neither the wall nor the ceiling that many people of undoubted valor have found coughing more discreet. Scipio coughed.

“Uncle Pasco,” said he gracefully, “I didn’t know you were that artistic.”

Uncle Pasco now marched to the bed, and appropriated Scipio’s pistol. “Just for the present,” he explained.

“Uncle Pasco,” resumed Scipio, mild as a dove, and never stirring from his chair, “you have learned me something to-day. It’s expensive education. I’ll not say it ain’t. But I’m goin’ to tell y’u where I went wrong. I’d ought to have acted more careless in Likely that night. I’d ought to have taken a whirl somewheres. Bein’ so quiet exposed my hand to y’u. But, see here, I had everybody fooled but you.”

“You’re a kid,” responded Uncle Pasco, but with indulgence. “You be good. Keep a-sittin’ right there. Pie like mother made.” And with the pie in one hand and his pistol in the other he made a comfortable lunch.

“It was my over-carefulness, warn’t it?” persisted Scipio. “I have sure paid y’u good to know!”

“You’re a kid,” Uncle Pasco, with unchanged indulgence, repeated. “You’ll do in time. Keep studying seasoned men. That’s what.” And he finished his meal. “You’ll find your six-shooter in the place where I’ll put it.”

The old gentleman opened the door, and, leaving Scipio in the chair, walked briskly by the corral into the trees and mounted his old pink mare. From the door of the cabin Scipio watched him amble away along the banks of Spit-Cat.

“Pie like mother made!” he muttered. “You patch-sewed bread-basket! Why, you fringy-panted walking delegate, I’ll agitate your system till your back teeth are chewin’ your own sweetbreads” He seized up a rope and began walking to where his horse was pasturing. “I could forgive him takin’ the money,” he continued. “He outplayed me. But—” Scipio was silent for a few yards, and then, “Pie like mother made!” he burst out again.

And now, reader, please rise with me in the air and look down like a bird at the trail of Spit-Kitten. The afternoon has grown late, and shadow is ascending among the thin pines by the Little Pasture. There goes Uncle Pasco, ambling easily along. He counts his money, and slaps his bad old leg with joy. With all those dollars he can render the next several months more than comfortable. Now he consults Scipio’s map, and here, sure enough, he comes to the fence, just as Scipio said he would come; that fence he was to follow for three miles, perhaps, or four. Uncle Pasco slaps his leg again, and gives a horrid, unconscientious cackle. And now he hangs Scipio’s pistol on a post of the fence and proceeds. While pleasing thoughts of San Francisco and champagne fill his mind as he rides, there comes Scipio along the trail after him at a nicely set interval. All is working with the agreeable precision of a clock. Scipio recovers his pistol, and after tying his horse out of sight a little way down the hill, he runs back and sits snug behind a tree close to the fence, waiting. He looks at his watch. “It took Japan and me twenty minutes to go around at a gallop,” he observes. “Uncle Pasco ain’t goin’ half that fast.” Scipio continues to wait with his six-shooter ready. In due time he pricks up his ears and rises upon his feet behind the tree. Next, he steps forth with his smile of an angel—but a fallen angel.

“Pie like mother made,” he remarks musically.

Why tell of Uncle Pasco’s cruel surprise? It is not known if he had gone round the fence more than once; but the town of Likely saw the dreadful condition of his clothes as he rode in that night. It was almost no clothes.

At that hour Scipio was finishing his letter to the foreman:—

“—this risponsibillity is shed,” had been the unwritten fragment of his sentence when it was cut short, and he now completed it, and went on:—

“Quite a little thing has took place just now about that money. Don’t jump for I am staying with it as you said to and I am liable to be staying with it as long as necessary but an old hobo held me up and got it off me and kept it for most three hours when I got it back off the old fool. I would not have throwed him around like I did if he had been content to lift the cash but he had to insult me too said I was pie and next time he’ll know a man should be civil no matter what his employment is.

“I have noticed another thing. To shoot strait always go to bed the same day you get up and to think strait use same pollicy.

“Your friend,

“Scipio Le Moyne.

“P.S. I am awful oblidged to you.”