CHAPTER XXXIII.

LITTLE DICK IN TROUBLE.

Little Dick Fosdick had been forgotten by Ted and the broncho boys in
their anxiety over the absence of Stella.

They had seen him around the camp, but as it was impossible for him to
accompany them on their hard rides, he had been left to his own devices.

He spent his days riding with one of the cowboys on the herd, and
grieving in his own way for Stella.

He was a sensible little chap, and seldom complained at his loneliness.
His life alone had made him patient, and he took it out in thinking.

He was now well able to take care of himself, although Stella insisted
in "mothering" him when she was in camp.

Little Dick, as most of the boys called him, felt himself quite a man,
for he could now catch his own pony and saddle it whenever he wanted to
ride, and no one paid any attention to him as he came and went.

Ted had bought for him a little, wiry bay cayuse, and both he and Stella
had taught him to ride, and Dick could now throw a rope with reasonable
accuracy and speed.

Ted had given him a small revolver, and they had had great fun learning
to shoot at a target, which was usually a bleached skull of a cow that
had died long since on the prairie, and its bones picked clean by the
coyotes.

Dick's revolver was only of thirty-two caliber, as befitted his
strength, but the youngster had a good eye and the steady nerves of
youth, and he soon got so that he could hit the skull with reasonable
accuracy.

"Putting the shot through the eye" was one of the jokes of these
shooting tournaments, in which Stella, and sometimes Bud, joined.

One day when they were shooting at a skull target, Bud missed--probably
intentionally, for Bud was a crack shot.

Dick jumped up and down in glee, for he had just knocked a chip of bone
from the skull himself.

"Bud missed! Bud missed!" he shouted, in glee. "Bud, you're an old
tenderfoot. Couldn't hit a skull as big as the head of a barrel a
hundred feet away."

"Didn't miss, neither," said Bud, in a tone of mock anger. "There's
where you're fooled. That is what I call a good shot. See that left eye
hole? Well, I aimed at that, and the bullet went through it. Ha! That's
where the joke is on you." He grinned, and winked at Stella.

A few minutes later Dick shot and missed the skull.

"Yah!" shouted Bud. "Goody! You missed. You shoot like a hayseed.
Couldn't hit a skull as big as the head of a barrel."

"That's where you're lef