Again she was entirely right. From good heart and long habit Jimsy made welcome every passing traveler and his horse. When Wyoming was young and its ranches lay wide, desert miles apart, such hospitality was the natural, unwritten law; but now, in this day of increasing settlements and of rainbowed folders of railroads painting a promised land for all comers, a young ranchman could easily be kept poor by the perpetual drain on his groceries and his oats. Jimsy’s wife was stepping between him and his bachelor shiftlessness in all directions, and the propitious signs oi her influence were everywhere. Indoors and out, a crisp, new appearance of things harbingered good fortune. Why, she had actually started him on reforming his gates! Did you ever see the thing they were frequently satisfied to call a gate in Wyoming? A sordid wreck of barbed wire and rotten wood, hung across the fence-gap by a rusty loop, raggedly dangling like the ribs of a broken umbrella. The telephone bell called Mrs. Culloden to the sitting-room near the end of dinner. Mrs. Sedlaw, her dear friend and schoolmate living five miles up the valley, was inviting them to dinner next day to eat roast grouse. “Let’s go,” said Jimsy. “And you quit your ditch and me quit my ironing?” answered the clear voice. “Thank you ever so much, Susie; we’d just love to, but Jimsy can’t go off the ranch this week and I’d not like to leave him all alone, even if I wasn’t as busy as I can be with our wash.” There followed exchange of gossip and laughter over it, and much love sent to and fro--and the receiver was hung up. “As for grouse,” I said to Jimsy, for his silence was on my nerves, “I will now go and catch you some trout superior to any bird that flies.” Sir Francis, the snow-white drake, stood by the woodpile as I crossed the enclosure on my way to the river. In the pond the lady ducks were loudly quacking, but I passed them by. I desired the solitude of Buffalo Horn, its pools, its cottonwoods, its quiet presiding mountains; and I walked up its stream for a mile, safe from that clear voice and from the bewildered eye of Jimsy, my once blithe, careless friend. Unless it be from respect for Izaak Walton and tradition, I know not why I ever carry in my fly-book, or ever use, a brown-hackle; it has wasted hours of fishing time for me. The hours this afternoon it did not waste, because, under the spell of the large day that shone upon the valley, my thoughts dwelt not on fish, but with delicious vagueness upon matrimony, the game laws and those ducks. With the waters of Buffalo Horn talking near by and singing far off, I watched all things rather than my line and often wholly stopped to smell the wild, clean odor of the sage-brush and draw the beauty of everything into my very depths. So from pool to pool I waded down the south fork of Buffalo Horn and had caught nothing when I reached Sheep Creek, by Scipio’s ranch. Here I changed to a grizzly king and soon had killed four trout.