It was well for me that my teams were way-wised so that they
drove themselves. I could have made Monterey Centre easily that night;
for it was only about eight o'clock by the sun next morning when I
pulled up at the blacksmith shop, and was told by Jim Boyd, the smith,
that I was in Monterey Centre.
And now I did not know what to do. I did not know where my land was, nor
how to find out. Monterey Prairie was as blank as the sea, except for a
few settlers' houses scattered about within a mile or two of the
village. I sat scratching my head and gazing about me like a lunkhead
while Boyd finished shoeing a horse, and had begun sharpening the lay of
a breaking-plow--when up rode Pitt Bushyager on one of the horses he and
his gang had had in the Grove of Destiny back beyond Waterloo.
I must have started when I saw him; for he glanced at me sharply and
suspiciously, and his dog-like brown eyes darted about for a moment, as
if the dog in him had scented game: then he looked at my jaded cows, at
my muddy wagon, its once-white cover now weather-beaten and ragged, and
at myself, a buttermilk-eyed, tow-headed Dutch boy with a face covered
with down like a month-old gosling; and his eyes grew warm and friendly,
as they usually looked, and his curly black mustache parted from his
little black goatee with a winning smile. After he had turned his horse
over to the smith, he came over and talked with me. He said he had seen
cows broken to drive by the Pukes--as we used to call the
Missourians--but never except by those who were so "pore" that they
couldn't get horses, and he could see by my nice outfit, and the number
of cows I had, that I could buy and sell some of the folks that drove
horses.
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