There was the suit I had worn on that memorable excursion to the Cliff House—­I had told Rankin to pitch it into the street, for I had discovered Teddy Van Greve in one almost exactly like it, and—­Hello!  Rankin had certainly overlooked a bet.  I never caught him at it before, that’s certain.  He had a way of coming to my left elbow, and, in a particularly virtuous tone, calling my attention to the fact that I had left several loose bills in my pockets.  Rankin was that honest I often told him he would land behind the bars as an embezzler some day.  But Rankin had done it this time, for fair; tucked away in a pocket of the waistcoat was money—­real, legal, lawful tender—­m-o-n-e-y!  I don’t suppose the time will ever come when it will look as good to me as it did right then.  I held those bank-notes—­there were two of them, double XX’s—­to my face and sniffed them like I’d never seen the like before and never expected to again.  And the funny part was that I forgot all about wanting the gray trousers, and all about the faults of Rankin.  My feet were on bottom again, and my head on top.  I marched down-stairs, whistling, with my hands in my pockets and my chin in the air, and told the landlord to serve dinner an hour earlier than usual, and to make it a good one.

He looked at me with a curious mixture of wonder and amusement.  “Dinner,” he drawled calmly, “has been over for three hours; but I guess we can give yuh some supper any time after five.”

I suppose he looked upon me as the rankest kind of a tenderfoot.  I calculated the time of my torture till I might, without embarrassing explanations, partake of a much-needed repast, and went to the door; waiting was never my long suit, and I had thoughts of getting outside and 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.