taking a look around. At the second step I changed my mind--there was that
deceptive mud to reckon with.

So from the doorway I surveyed all of Montana that lay between me and the
sky-line, and decided that my bets would remain on California. The sky was
a dull slate, tumbled into what looked like rain-clouds and depressing to
the eye. The land was a dull yellowish-brown, with a purple line of hills
off to the south, and with untidy snow-drifts crouching in the hollows.
That was all, so far as I could see, and if dulness and an unpeopled
wilderness make for the reformation of man, it struck me that I was in a
fair way to become a saint if I stayed here long. I had heard the
cattle-range called picturesque; I couldn't see the joke.

Frosty Miller sat opposite me at table when, in the course of human
events, I ate again, and the way I made the biscuit and ham and boiled
potatoes vanish filled him with astonishment, if one may judge a man's
feelings by the size of his eyes. I told him that the ozone of the plains
had given me an appetite, and he did not contradict me; he looked at my
plate, and then smiled at his own, and said nothing--which was polite of
him.

"Did you ever skip two meals and try to make it up on the third?" I asked
him when we went out, and he said "Sure," and rolled a cigarette. In those
first hours of our acquaintance Frosty was not what I'd call loquacious.

That night I took out the letter addressed to one Perry Potter, which dad
had given me and which I had not had time to seal in his presence, and
read it cold-bloodedly. I don't do such things as a rule, but I was
getting a suspicion that I was being queered; that I'd got to start my
exile under a handicap of the contempt of the natives. If dad had stacked