'Say'--he suddenly became voluble,--'you said you wanted to get to Hamden. Well, if you'll make it five plunks, and give me your ticket, you can take this horse, an' I'll go round by train. Say--do you want to?' Cargan was tempted. All you had to do was to stick on. 'What'll I do with my suit-case?' 'Gimme it to take for you. I guess it ain't worth more'n my horse.' II They helped him on, and pointed out the dim line of telephone poles which marked a road a mile beyond. He walked his horse onward, not daring to trot, struck the dusty highway, rode on over an imperceptible roll of the plains, and was alone on a vast bare earth, naked as when born from the womb of time. Plover swung up before him with melancholy cries. A soft haze rose from the plains. They grew more vast, more endless. In the north, a white cloud-mass piled itself up and up until it seemed as if it might topple over upon the flat world beneath. He had never before looked at the country except as real estate, never seen the plains, and a curious new sense of the bigness of the earth oppressed him. He felt very small and very mean. The humiliation of his spirits was a novel feeling and an unpleasant one; he tried to hum it away:-- 'Just wait till I strike Broadway And watch me with the girls, For I'm the man that invented it-- The hair that always curls.' His harsh voice in the stillness was ridiculous,--even to him,--but when he stopped singing, the silence flowed over him as a stream that had been held back. The sky was enormous; he was only a speck on the vast floor. As he plodded on and on and on through the dust, he began to grow dizzy from the glare and the heat. He could not collect his thoughts for business. A curious sense of weakened identity perplexed him, and his head was full of drifting pictures--Waldron's face among them. That face lingered. He saw him looking vaguely out of the car window--saying that he couldn't stand up under it--that it was 'impossible.' He wondered if it was a bluff, after all. The face faded away leaving a dull pity behind it, a struggling remorse. Cargan shifted uneasily in his saddle, and tried to think of business. But instead of business queer childish ideas began floating in and out of his mind, accompanied by words remembered from Sundays in his boyhood. He was alone with God. God saw into his heart. A little nervous shiver ran over him, and when he checked it with a laugh there followed a wave of superstitious emotion. A low wave of the prairies had hidden from him a little house and barn standing crudely new against the sky in the distance. Tiny figures were moving behind the buildings, and a dust-cloud rose from the highway in front. Cargan suddenly became conscious of his appearance--his serge suit, his straw hat, his awkward seat in the saddle. The loneliness of the plains had shaken his usual self-assurance.