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 the deck on me, I wanted to know it.  But I misjudged him—­or, perhaps, he knew I’d read it.  All he had written wouldn’t hurt the reputation of any one.  It was: 

The bearer, Ellis H. Carleton, is my son.  He will probably be with you for some time, and will not try to assume any authority or usurp your position as foreman and overseer.  You will treat him as you do the other boys, and if he wants to work, pay him the same wages—­if he earns them.

It wasn’t exactly throwing flowers in the path my young feet should tread, but it might have been worse.  At least, he did not give Perry Potter his unbiased opinion of me, and it left me with a free hand to warp their judgment somewhat in my favor.  But—­“If he wants to work, pay him the same wages—­if he earns them.”  Whew!

I might have saved him the trouble of writing that, if I had only known it.  Dad could go too far in this thing, I told myself chestily.  I had come, seeing that he insisted upon it, but I’d be damned if I’d work for any man with a circus-poster name, and have him lord it over me.  I hadn’t been brought up to appreciate that kind of joke.  I meant to earn my living, but I did not mean to get out and slave for Perry Potter.  There must be something respectable for a man to do in this country besides ranch work.

In the morning we started off, with my trunks in the wagon, toward the line of purple hills in the south.  Frosty Miller told me, when I asked him, that they were forty-eight miles away, that they marked the Missouri River, and that we would stop there overnight.  That, if I remember, was about the extent of our conversation that day.  We smoked cigarettes—­Frosty Miller made his, one by one, as he needed them—­and thought our own thoughts.  I rather suspect our thoughts were a good many miles apart, though our shoulders touched.  When you think of it, people may rub elbows and still have an ocean or two between them.  I don’t know where Frosty was, all through that long day’s ride; for me, I was back in little old Frisco, with Barney MacTague and the rest of the crowd; and part of the time, I know, I was telling dad what a mess he’d made of bringing up his only son.

That night we slept in a shack at the river—­“Pochette Crossing” was the name it answered to—­and shared the same bed.  It was not remarkable for its comfort—­that bed.  I think the mattress was stuffed with potatoes; it felt that way.

Next morning we were off again, over the same bare, brown, unpeopled wilderness.  Once we saw a badger zigzagging along a side-hill, and Frosty whipped out a big revolver—­one of those “Colt 45’s,” I suppose—­and shot it; he said in extenuation that they play the very devil with the range, digging holes for cow-punchers to break their necks over.