The next morning found Mr. Tupper still on deck. Evidently a steady diet of strong whisky and rough-and-tumble fighting agreed with his peculiar constitution. That night we were all but done; two hours’ work in the morning would put the _Moon_ in shape for the down-river journey. And when evening fell I took a notion to walk up and down the streets of Benton once more. It may have been that the prospect of getting to St. Louis in the near future made me desire to flaunt my independence in the face of the mate. Anyway, without stopping to make a critical analysis of motives, I slipped away from the _Moon_ when dark closed in. The engineer came aboard a minute before I left, and I heard him call to his assistant that Tupper was a sheet and a half in the wind, and still wearing his fighting-clothes. But I took no thought of turning back. Right up the main street I marched, venturing into one saloon after another without mishap. I felt quite elated, like a small boy playing “hookey” from school. And when, in the course of my prowling about, I ran into a half dozen hilarious cowpunchers I clean forgot Mr. Tupper and the unkind things he had promised to do to me. The camp of these cattlemen, I gathered from their talk, was on the divide that loomed to the north of Benton, and after the manner of their kind they were “taking in the town” for the first time in many weeks. Wherefore, they were thirsty and noisy, and insistent that everybody should drink and be joyful. To one of them, a youngster near my own age, slim, sinewy, picturesque in his hair-faced chaps and high-heeled boots, I talked a little, but it was a hit-and-miss conversation, by reason of the general uproar, and the rapidity with which drinks came. I was all for information, and in his free-and-easy way he shed beams of light upon my black ignorance of range affairs. But alas! a discordant element burst rudely in upon our talk-_fiesta_. Tupper stalked in from the street, and chance decreed that his roving, belligerent eye should single me out of the crowd. I was leaning against a disreputable billiard table, at the time, and straight for me he came, not saying a word, but squinting up his little, pig eyes in a manner that boded ill. I didn’t move. Though my heart flopped like a new-landed trout, I couldn’t quite bring myself to slink away. Beaten and bluffed and cowed as I had been for the past two weeks, I hadn’t quite lost the power to resent, and though I shrank from the weight of Tupper’s ungodly fists I shrank more from absolute flight. Something of the atmosphere of the ranges had crept into me that evening. I did not know what I was about to do, except that I was not going to run away from any red-whiskered brute from St. Louis or any other section of the globe.