It was such an immensity of sky and grass! And when you’ve said sky and grass, you’ve said it all: there was nothing else within reach of human vision except the faint bulge of the mountains far to the west.

I had the feeling I could ride on across that plain all through my life and never get across it. I knew there were places across it—Philadelphia was across it, for example, and St. Louis and a number of other cities—but so endless were the plains that it seemed I would be lucky to arrive at any of those cities much before the hour of my death.

I felt the plains had caught me in some way; when I finally did make my return to the Eastern cities, it was a burden to have to resume life under such small skies.

“You might as well pull that hat down to your chin, Sippy,” Billy Bone said to me—he was amused at my habit of lowering my headgear down to about eyebrow level, the headgear being a floppy hat I had purchased in El Paso.

Billy didn’t realize that the Western light was an altogether different species from the thin, manageable light of Philadelphia. A full day of drinking it in gave me headaches as severe as if I’d spent the same amount of time guzzling a ripe wine.

“Oh, this is fine,” I said. “I don’t need to see past the ears of this mule, anyway.”

“If Old Whiskey and the tall nigger were to lope out of one of these gullies you’d need to see,” he informed me. “You’d not only need to see, you’d need to fly.”

He was referring to Will Isinglass, owner of the Whiskey Glass ranch—his cowboys referred to him as Old Whiskey because of his habit of strapping a quart jar of whiskey to his saddle before he left his headquarters each morning. He had had a well-padded pouch made to protect his quart—and if he happened to chance back by his ranch house around the lunch hour, he’d secure himself another quart for the afternoon.

Of course Isinglass and Mesty-Woolah—his African warrior—didn’t lope out of any gullies that day, but I believe in the course of that long ride Billy Bone decided to adopt me, more or less. The peculiar way I had of wearing my hat seemed to convince him that I couldn’t possibly take care of myself.

“Why’d you ever come out here anyway, Sippy?” he asked that evening, as we were watching our second campfire die. There were no prairie chickens to feast on that night, either—just a couple of stringy jackrabbits.

“You should have hit that brunette you married with a bed slat,” he told me. “Then you wouldn’t have to be out here trying to stay alive in a place you don’t know nothing about.”

12.