Then I rolled my bed one morning, caught out two horses from my string instead of one, told the wagon-boss I was going back to the ranch, and lit out--with the whole bunch grinning after me.

As they would have said, they were all "dead next," but were good enough not to say so.

Or, perhaps, they remembered the boxing-lessons I had given them in the bunk-house a year or more ago.
I did feel kind of sneaking, quitting them like that; but it's like playing higher than your logical limit: you know you're doing a fool thing, and you want to plant your foot violently upon your own person somewhere, but you go right ahead in the face of it all.

They didn't have to tell me I was acting like a calf that has lost his mother in the herd.
(You know he is prone to go mooning back to the last place he was with her, if it's ten miles.) I knew it, all right.

And when I topped a hill and saw the high ridges and peaks of White Divide stand up against the horizon to the north, I was so glad I felt ashamed of myself and called one Ellis Carleton worse names than I'd stand to hear from anybody else.
Still, to go back to the metaphor, I kept on shoving in chips, just as if I had a chance to win out and wasn't the biggest, softest-headed idiot the Lord ever made.