Wallie's face was sober as he confided: "If anything went wrong I'd be done for. I'm so near broke that I count my nickels like some old woman with her butter-and-egg money."
"I guessed it," said Pinkey, calmly, "from the rabbit fur I see layin' around the dooryard."
"Nearly everything has cost double what I thought it would, but if I get a good crop and the price of wheat holds up I'll come out a-flying."
"If nothin' happens," Pinkey supplemented.
"I want to show you one of those bulletins."
"I've seen plenty of 'em. You can't stop 'em once you git 'em started. Them, and pamphlets tellin' us why we went to war, has killed off many a mail-carrier that had to fight his way through blizzards, or be fined fer not deliverin' 'em on schedule. I ain't strong fer gover'mint literature."
Wallie stepped inside the cabin and brought out a pamphlet with an illustration of twelve horses hitched to a combined harvester and thresher, standing in a wheat-field of boundless acreage.
"There," he said, proudly, "you see my ambition!"
Pinkey regarded it, unexcited.
"That's a real nice picture," he said, finally, "but I thought you aimed to go in for cattle?"
"I did. But I've soured on them since that calf came and I've been milking."
Pinkey agreed heartily: "I'd ruther 'swamp' fer a livin' than do low-down work like milkin'."
"When I come in at night, dog-tired and discouraged, I get out this picture and look at it and tell myself that some day I'll be driving twelve horses on a thresher. A chap thinks and does curious things when he has nobody but himself for company."
"That's me, too," said Pinkey, understandingly. "When I'm off alone huntin' stock, I ride fer hours wonderin' if it's so that you kin make booze out of a raisin."
"Let's walk out and look at the wheat," Wallie suggested.
Pinkey complied obligingly, though farming was an industry in which he took no interest.
Wallie's pride in his wheat was inordinate. He never could get over a feeling of astonishment that the bright green grain had come from seeds of his planting--that it was his--and he would reap the benefit. Nature was more wonderful than he had realized and he never before had appreciated her. He always forgot the heart-breaking and back-breaking labour when he stood as now, surveying with glowing face the even green carpet stretching out before him. In such moments he found his compensation for all he had gone through since he arrived in Wyoming, and he smiled pityingly as he thought of the people at The Colonial, rocking placidly on the veranda.