Pete twisted his hat in his hands. He did not know what to say. Slowly he backed from the room, turned, and strode out to Andy White. Andy wondered what Pete had been up to, but waited for him to speak.
Presently Pete cleared his throat. "I'm coming over to your wickiup to-morrow and strike for a job. I got the promise of a rig, all right. Don't want no second-hand rig, anyhow! I'm the Ridin' Kid from Powder River and I'm comin' with head up and tail a-rollin'."
"Whoopee!" sang Andy, and swung to his pony.
"I'm a-comin'!" called Pete as Andy clattered away into the night.
Pete felt happy and yet strangely subdued. The dim road flickered before him as he trudged back to the sheep-camp. "Pop would 'a' done it that way," he said aloud. And for a space, down the darkening road he walked in that realm where the invisible walk, and beside him trudged the great, rugged shape of Annersley, the spirit of the old man who always "played square," feared no man, and fulfilled a purpose in the immeasurable scheme of things. Pete knew that Annersley would have been pleased. So it was that Young Pete paid the most honorable debt of all, the debt to memory that the debtor's own free hand may pay or not--and none be the wiser, save the debtor. Pete had "played square." It was all the more to his credit that he hated like the dickens to give up his eighteen dollars and a half, and yet had done so.
While it is possible to approach the foreman of a cattle outfit on foot and apply for work, it is--as a certain Ulysses of the outlands once said--not considered good form in the best families in Arizona. Pete was only too keenly conscious of this. There is a prestige recognized by both employer and tentative employee in riding in, swinging to the ground in that deliberate and easy fashion of the Western rider, and sauntering up as though on a friendly visit wherein the weather and grazing furnish themes for introduction, discussion, and the eventual wedge that may open up the way to employment. The foreman knows by the way you sit your horse, dismount, and generally handle yourself, just where you stand in the scale of ability. He does not need to be told. Nor does he care what you have been. Your saddle-tree is much more significant than your family tree. Still, if you have graduated in some Far Eastern riding academy, and are, perchance, ambitious to learn the gentle art of roping, riding them as they come, and incidentally preserving your anatomy as an undislocated whole, it is not a bad idea to approach the foreman on foot and clothed in unpretentious garb. For, as this same Ulysses of the outlands said: