“It sure beats hell the way it hangs on,” he remarked, and from that minute I liked him.  It was the first crumb of sympathy that had fallen to me for days, and you can bet I appreciated it.

We got in, and he pulled a blanket over our knees and picked up the whip.  It wasn’t a stylish turnout—­I had seen farmers driving along the railroad-track in rigs like it, and I was surprised at dad for keeping such a layout.  Fact is, I didn’t think much of dad, anyway, about that time.

“How far is it to the Bay State Ranch?” I asked.

“One hundred and forty miles, air-line,” said he casually.  “The train was late, so I reckon we better stop over till morning.  There’s a town over the hill, and a hotel that beats nothing a long way.”

A hundred and forty miles from the station, “air-line,” sounded to me like a pretty stiff proposition to go up against; also, how was a fellow going to put up at a hotel when he hadn’t the coin?  Would my mysterious guide be shocked to learn that John A. Carleton’s son and heir had landed in a strange land without two-bits to his name?  Jerusalem!  I couldn’t have paid street-car fare down-town; I couldn’t even have bought a paper on the street.  While I was remembering all the things a millionaire’s son can’t do if he happens to be without a nickel in his pocket, we pulled up before a place that, for the sake of propriety, I am willing to call a hotel; at the time, I remember, I had another name for it.

“In case I might get lost in this strange city,” I said to my companion as I jumped out, “I’d like to know what people call you when they’re in a good humor.”

He grinned down at me.  “Frosty Miller would hit me, all right,” he informed me, and drove off somewhere down the street.  So I went in and asked for a room, and got it.

This sounds sordid, I know, but the truth must be told, though the artistic sense be shocked.  Barred from the track as I was, sent out to grass in disgrace while the little old world kept moving without me to help push, my mind passed up all the things I might naturally be supposed to dwell upon and stuck to three little no-account grievances that I hate to tell about now.  They look small, for a fact, now that they’re away out of sight, almost, in the past; but they were quite big enough at the time to give me a bad hour or two.  The biggest one was the state of my appetite; next, and not more than a nose behind, was the state of my pockets; and the last was, had Rankin packed the gray tweed trousers that I had a liking for, or had he not?  I tried to remember whether I had spoken to him about them, and I sat down on the edge of the bed in that little box of a room, took my head between my fists, and called Rankin several names he sometimes deserved and had frequently heard from my lips.  I’d have given a good deal to have Rankin at my elbow just then.

They were not in the suit-case—­or, if they were, I had not run across them.  Rankin had a way of stowing things away so that even he had to do some tall searching, and he had another way of filling up my suit-cases with truck I’d no immediate use for.  I yanked the case toward me, unlocked it, and turned it out on the bed, just to prove Rankin’s general incapacity as valet to a fastidious fellow like me.