He couldn't help it; the ejaculation popped out of its own accord. The other regarded him with grave displeasure.
"If you had your bead drawed an' somebody jogged your arm jest as you pulled the trigger, would you call it a miss?"
"Excuse me. I've no doubt you're extremely accurate."
"I ne'er miss," said the other, and proved it by disposing of the egg at the next imposing mouthful.
"I should like to know you. My name is Anthony Bard."
A gesture indicated the barren, brown waste of prairie.
"Even the cattle got no fight in 'em." He added, "That sounds like I'm a fighter. I ain't."
"You're pretty familiar with the Western country?"
He took a scroll from his breast pocket and unrolled the photograph of the forest and the ranchhouse with the two mountains in the distance. Wilkes considered it unperturbed.
"Ah! Then all I have to do is to travel to the foot of the Little Brothers?"
"No, about sixty miles from 'em." "Impossible! Why, the mountains almost overhang that house."
Wilkes handed back the picture and resumed his eating without reply. It was not a sullen resentment; it was hunger and a lack of curiosity. He was not "heated up."
"Any one," said Anthony, to lure the other on, "could see that."
"Well, at least the big tree there and the ranchhouse will not be very hard to find. But I suppose I'll have to travel in a circle around the Little Brothers, keeping a sixty-mile radius?"
"If you want to waste a pile of time. Yes."
"I suppose you could lead me right to the spot?"
"That's about fifty-five miles straight north-east of the Little Brothers."
"That ain't hard. They's a pretty steady north wind that blows in them parts. It's cold and it's strong. Now when you been out there long enough and get the idea that the only things that live is because God loves 'em. Mostly it's jest plain sand and rock. The trees live because they got protection from that north wind. Nature puts moss on 'em on the north side to shelter 'em from that same wind. Look at that picture close. You see that rough place on the side of that tree--jest a shadow like the whiskers of a man that ain't shaved for a week? That's the moss. Now if that's north, the rest is easy. That place is north-east of the Little Brothers."