It was best of all, he thought, to be part of the large silence of the mountains and the sea. The Wolcotts were talkers and all their friends were talkers. They talked entertainingly and well but they talked most of the time, and they had insisted that the Happy Warrior should converse unsparingly of all he had seen and done, of all that had been done to him, of his actions and reactions in the red welter of conflict. Therefore, devoted as he was to the doctor and much as he appreciated the time and pains the Ranger had spent upon him, he was glad to be alone with Snort, with the extra horse whom the Ranger had left as a sort of spare tire, and the Ranger’s dog, a small, shabby Airedale of reserved manner. Making his daily rides according to schedule he formed the habit of passing by the infrequent ranch houses without a hail: later he would be more clubby with the cordially kind people within them, but for the present he desired to be like the stout (and, he recalled, incorrectly named) gentleman of the well-known sonnet--silent upon a peak in Darien. There were a great many peaks for him to be silent upon and he rode tirelessly from one to the other. Ordinarily, his various “beats,” as the Ranger had jocularly called them, were so arranged that he might serve himself with human society at least every forty-eight hours, but he determined upon a week’s fast from the sight and sound of his fellows. By arriving late at his headquarters--the cabin at Post’s--and leaving early, by passing Slate’s Springs with its lure of a hot and comforting meal, making his own slender supper, and lodging in his sleeping bag on the ground, he was able to manage his seven days hermiting, and he told himself that--with every muscle in play--it was still the most perfect rest he had ever known. He believed that he now understood Snort perfectly, and that Snort was on the way to understanding him. Rusty, the Ranger’s dog, had a faintly scornful air of understanding him only too well; he sat disdainfully aloof and watched the Bostonian at his saddling, his fire building, his camp making, with an air of weary tolerance, and he was even guilty of yawning in the young man’s face. “All right, old top,” Dean Wolcott would say to him, “I dare say I’m a pale imitation of your master, and that I shall never quite reach the picturesqueness and dash of the ‘Virginian,’ but you might give me credit for coming on, you know.”