You'd better tear her out of your memory before she gets too firmly lodged there." Keith boldly said he would take the chances.
When old Rawson saw him he, too, remarked on his thinness; but more encouragingly.
"Well, 'a lean dog for a long chase,'" he said.
"How are cattle ?" inquired Keith.
The old fellow turned his eyes on him with a keen look.
"Cattle's tolerable.

I been buyin' a considerable number up toward Gumbolt, where you're goin'.

I may get you to look after 'em some day," he chuckled.
Gordon wrote to Dave Dennison that he was going to Gumbolt and would look out for him.

A little later he learned that the boy had already gone there.
The means of reaching Gumbolt from Eden, the terminus of the railroad which Wickersham & Company were building, was still the stage, a survivor of the old-time mountain coach, which had outlasted all the manifold chances and changes of fortune.
Happily for Keith, he had been obliged, though it was raining, to take the outside seat by the driver, old Tim Gilsey, to whom he recalled himself, and by his coolness at "Hellstreak Hill," where the road climbed over the shoulder of the mountain along a sheer cliff, and suddenly dropped to the river below, a point where old Gilsey was wont to display his skill as a driver and try the nerves of passengers, he made the old man his friend for life.
When the stage began to ascend the next hill, the old driver actually unbent so far as to give an account of a "hold-up" that had occurred at that point not long before, "all along of the durned railroad them Yankees was bringin' into the country," to which he laid most of the evils of the time.

"For when you run a stage you know who you got with you," declared Mr.Gilsey; "but when you run a railroad you dunno who you got." "Well, tell me about the time you were held up." "Didn't nobody hold me up," sniffed Mr.Gilsey.