mons had said it was only a "little ways" to the prominent hill from which the hamlet of Lost Cabin could be seen across the twelve or fifteen miles of Galloway's enclosure, which was narrow in that place owing to the indenture made in its opposite border by the town. Rawlins was certain he had traveled no less than fifteen miles when he hauled himself up to the hilltop about noon. He knew it was the hill Clemmons had meant, for the little white houses of Lost Cabin were as plain as dice on a table, almost due west of him.
If that was only a little way, spare him the long ways, Rawlins thought. From that he fell to speculating, sitting on top of the hill where the grass was green and promising, on the postulation that these unfilled reaches of the north-west had something in their very vastness that contributed to men's success there.
Men grew into the way of thinking in large terms in that country. Five hundred sheep were only a few, three thousand but a band. When a man spoke of a flock, he meant thirty thousand, fifty thousand. Thinking in big terms was followed by planning and doing in big terms. The country was responsible for it, more than the men themselves. That would account for some of the dumb-looking flockmasters he had met at the stockyards. The country had laid hold of them, mediocre seed dropped in its fecund soil, and turned out prodigious growths which might have been only stunted starvelings in another clime.
Nature had cleared the air for human enlargement there; man's field of vision was almost painfully enlarged. His hitherto valued possessions, accomplish-
