t it would have entailed an effort which he did not care to make. It
was nothing to him whether the round-up wagon got up the hill that
night--or never.

Smith thought the driver was alone until he began to back the team to rush
the hill once more. Then he heard angry exclamations coming from the rear
of the wagon--exclamations which sounded not unlike the buzzing of an
enraged bumble-bee. He stretched his neck and saw that which suggested an
overgrown hoop-snake rolling down the hill. At the bottom a little
mud-coated man stood up. The part of his face that was visible above his
beard was pale with anger. His brown eyes gleamed behind mud-splashed
spectacles.

"Oscar Tubbs," he demanded, "why did you not tell me that you were about
to back the wagon?"

"I would have did it if I had knowed myself that the team were goin' to
back," replied Tubbs, in the conciliatory tone of one who addresses the
man who pays him his wages.

The man in spectacles groaned. "Three inexcusable errors in one sentence.
Oscar Tubbs, you are hopeless!"

"Yep," replied that person resignedly; "nobody never could learn me
nothin'. Onct I knowed----"

"Stop! We have no time for a reminiscence. Have you any reason to believe
that we can get up this hill to-night?"

"No chanst of it. These buzzard-heads has drawed every poun' they kin
pull. But I has some reason to believe that if you don't hist your hoofs
out'n that mud-hole, you'll bog down. You're up to your pant-leg now. Onct
I knowed----"

The little man threw out his hand in a restraining gesture, and Tubbs,
foiled again, closed his lips and watched his employer stand back on one
leg while he pulled the other out of the mud with a long, sucking sound.

"What for an outfit is that, anyhow?" mused Smith, watching the
proceedings with some interest. "He looks like one of them bug-hunters.
He's got a pair of shoulders on him like a drink of water, and his legs
look like the runnin'-gears of a katydid."

So intently were they all engaged in watching the man's struggles that no
one observed a girl on a galloping horse until she was almost upon them.
She sat her sturdy, spirited pony like a cowboy. She was about sixteen,
with a suggestion of boyishness in her appearance. Her brown hair, worn in
a single braid, was bleached to a lighter shade on top, as if she rode
always with bared head. Her eyes were gray, in curious contrast to a tawny
skin. She was slight to scrawniness, and, one might