He simply had to put it up before he could go on.

You always had to shut gates if you found them shut--that was a law of the range which the Kid had learned so long ago he could not remember when he had learned And there was another reason--he did not want em to know he had passed that way, if they took a notion to call him back.

So he worked and he tugged and he grew so red in the face it looked as if he were choking.

But he got the gate up and the wire loop over the stake--though he had to hunt up an old piece of a post to stand on, and even then had to stand on his toes to reach the loop--since he was Chip's Kid and the Little Doctor's.
He even remembered to scrape out the tell-tale prints of his small feet in the bare earth there, and the prints of Silver's feet where he went through.

Yarns he had heard the Happy Family tell, in the bunk-house on rainy days, had taught him these tricks.