All the afternoon he rode continually up hill, till towards five o’clock he struck the Dominion divide, and timber. The air here, in contrast to the valley below, was cold, and Loring, only thinly dressed, shivered. Several times cattle “outfits” passed him on the trail. Men were driving in from the range scraggly bunches of steers, to be fattened before selling. Once he did not pull his horse out of the trail in time, and sent a bunch of frightened cattle stampeding into the underbrush. He was so engrossed in his thoughts that he hardly noticed the cursing which he received from the ranchmen. At dusk, beside the trail, he saw a bright fire in front of a tent. Two men, occupied in frying bacon, and boiling coffee, were seated before it. The smell that arose from the cooking appealed strongly to Stephen, and he reined in his horse. “Howdy, stranger! Making for Dominion?” one of the men called out. “Well, you won’t get there for some time yet. It is twelve miles from here. Better let us stake you to a meal. Come from Quentin, do you? Me and my pardner was going there to-morrow.” Stephen, with alacrity, accepted the proffered hospitality. “Much obliged, friend,” he said. “I’m pretty well broke, and I was not expecting to get anything to eat to-night.” “Don’t worry about that. You shan’t go by our outfit hungry. We ain’t made that way. There was a cuss I knowed once,” continued one of Loring’s hosts, “up in Cochise County. I was broke, flat busted, when I was there, and I asked him to stake me to a meal, and say, the mean skunk wouldn’t come through at all. Said I could ‘watch him eat.’ Now what do you think of that?” As he recalled the crime against hospitality, the man kicked vigorously at one of the logs on the fire. Loring listened, with due sympathy, to the tale, the while he eyed with hopeful glances the coffee-pot, at the edge of which a yellow foam soon appeared, serving as signal that the meal was ready. “Sorry we can’t give you flapjacks,” remarked one of the men, as he lifted the bacon off the fire. “Pardner here makes swell ones, but we’re pretty low on our grub outfit now. Hope we can get work at Quentin. Any jobs floating round loose there?” Stephen slowly filled his tin cup with coffee, and paused, after the western fashion, to blow into it a spoonful of condensed milk, before he answered. “I am not sure,” he said, “but I think that there is a vacancy on one of the hoists. I think they fired a man there recently.” “That’s good for us,” exclaimed one of the men. “Wish they’d fire some more!” Stephen did not continue the discussion. After a quiet smoke beside the embers of the fire, Stephen rose, and thanking his hosts warmly, prepared to leave. As he was mounting he happened to feel a flask that was in his pocket. He remembered vaguely having filled it the night before. Reaching down from the saddle he held out the flask. “Have a drink, gentlemen?” he asked. One of the men took the flask in his hands, almost reverently.