"Fifty!" shrieked Uncle Hughey, jumping in the air.

The Southerner took a tone of self-reproach. "Now, how could I
forget you was fifty," he murmured, "when you have been telling
it to the boys so careful for the last ten years!"

Have you ever seen a cockatoo--the white kind with the
top-knot--enraged by insult? The bird erects every available
feather upon its person. So did Uncle Hughey seem to swell,
clothes, mustache, and woolly white beard; and without further
speech he took himself on board the Eastbound train, which now
arrived from its siding in time to deliver him.

Yet this was not why he had not gone away before. At any time he
could have escaped into the baggage-room or withdrawn to a
dignified distance until his train should come up. But the old
man had evidently got a sort of joy from this teasing. He had
reached that inevitable age when we are tickled to be linked with
affairs of gallantry, no matter how.

With him now the Eastbound departed slowly into that distance
whence I had come. I stared after it as it went its way to the
far shores of civilization. It grew small in the unending gulf of
space, until all sign of its presence was gone save a faint skein
of smoke against the evening sky. And now my lost trunk came back
into my thoughts, and Medicine Bow seemed a lonely spot. A sort
of ship had left me marooned in a foreign ocean; the Pullman was
comfortably steaming home to port, while I--how was I to find
Judge Henry's ranch? Where in this unfeatured wilderness was Sunk
Creek? No creek or any water at all flowed here that I could