"Did you ever see anything prettier?" Wallie demanded, his eyes shining.
"It's all right," Pinkey murmured, absently.
"You're not looking," Wallie said, sharply.
"I was watchin' them cattle."
"I don't see any."
Pinkey pointed, but Wallie could see nothing.
"If they got cows on Mars, I'll bet I could read the bran's," Pinkey boasted. "Can't you see them specks movin' off yonder?"
Wallie admitted he could not.
"It's cattle, and they act like somebody's drivin' 'em," Pinkey declared, positively. "Looks like it's too early to be movin' 'em to the mountain."
His curiosity satisfied, he gave the wheat his attention.
"It looks fine, Wallie," he said with sincerity.
Wallie could not resist crowing: "You didn't think I'd last, did you? Miss Spenceley didn't, either. She'll be disappointed very likely when she hears I've succeeded."
"Don't cackle till you've laid your aig, Gentle Annie. When you've thrashed and sold your grain and got your money in the bank, then I'll help you. We'll git drunk if I have to rob a drug-store."
"You're always putting a damper on me. It was you who advised me to go in for dry-farming," Wallie reminded him.
"I figgered that if you lived through a year of it," Pinkey replied, candidly, "then almost anything else would look like a snap to you."
It was plain that in spite of his prospects Pinkey was not sanguine, but in this moment of his exultation failure seemed impossible to Wallie.
In various small ways Canby had tried to break him and had not succeeded. Boise Bill had prophesied that he would not "winter"--yet here he was with every reason to believe that he would also "summer." Wallie felt rather invincible as he reflected upon it, and the aurora borealis did not exceed in colour the outlook his fancy painted that evening.
"It's eight-thirty," Pinkey hinted. "When I set up till all hours I over-sleep in the morning."
Wallie came to earth reluctantly, and as he returned to the cabin he again permitted himself the luxury of pitying the folk of The Colonial who knew nothing of such rapturous moments in that stale, uneventful world which was so remote and different from the present that it was beginning to seem like a dream to him.
They had been asleep for an hour, more possibly, when Pinkey nudged Wallie violently.
"What's that huffin', do you reckon?"
Wallie awoke with a start and listened.
"Huffing" was the right word. Lying next to the logs, some large animal was breathing so heavily in Wallie's ear that it sounded like a bellows. He peered through a crack and saw something that looked like a mastodon in the darkness tugging at a sack he had used for chinking. It was not a horse and was too large for his Jersey. It flashed through his mind that it might be a roaming silvertip from the mountain.