"
"You needn't be alarmed; you haven't told me anything that the
department could make use of," returned Blount, carrying the jest the
one necessary move farther along.
It was precisely at this point, as Blount remembered afterward, that the
timber-thieving subject was dropped. Later on, after the talk had
drifted back to mining, and from mining to politics, the nervous
gentleman pleaded weariness and declared his intention of going to his
section to take a nap, and presently disappeared to carry it out.
Blount was not sorry to be left alone. In response to a vague stirring
of something within him--a thing which might have been the primitive
underman yawning and stretching to its awakening--he had been trying in
the window-facing intervals to reconstruct the passing panorama of
mountain and plain upon the recollections of his boyhood. As yet there
was little familiarity save in the broader outlines. Where he remembered
only the fallow-dun prairie, dotted with dog-mounds, there were now vast
ranches planted to sod corn; and upon the hills the cattle ranges were
no longer open. The towns, too, at which the train made its momentary
stops, were changed. The straggling shack hamlets of the cattle-shipping
period, with the shed-roofed railroad station, the whitewashed
loading-corral, and the towering water-tank--all backgrounded by a thin
line of saloons and dance-halls--had disappeared completely, and the
window-watcher found himself looking in vain for the flap-hatted,
cigarette-smoking horsemen with which the West of his boyhood had been
chiefly peopled.
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