ng," agreed Tubbs.

"There's that dude tryin' to make a stand-in, and spilin' his own game
all the time by talkin'. You can't say he talks, neither; he just opens
his mouth and lets it say what it damn pleases. Is them real words he gets
off, or does he make 'em up as he goes along?"

"Search me."

"I'll tip you off, feller: if ever you want to make a strong play at an
Injun woman, you don't want to shoot off your mouth none. Keep still and
move around just so, and pretty soon she'll throw you the sign. Did you
ever notice a dog trottin' down the street, passin' everybody up till all
to once it takes a sniff, turns around, and follers some feller off?
That's an Injun woman."

"I never had no luck with squaws, and the likes o' that," Tubbs confessed.
"They're turrible hands to git off together and poke fun at you."

As McArthur and the Indian woman came in from the kitchen, he was saying
earnestly to her:

"I feel sure that here, madam, I should entirely recover my health.
Besides, this locality seems to me such a fertile field for research that
if you could possibly accommodate my man and me with board, you may not be
conferring a favor only upon me, but indirectly, perhaps, upon the world
of science. I have with me my own bath-tub and pneumatic mattress."

Tubbs, seeing the Indian woman's puzzled expression, explained:

"He means we'll sleep ourselves if you will eat us."

The woman nodded.

"Oh, you can stay. I no care."

Smith frowned; but McArthur, much pleased by her assent, told Tubbs to
saddle a horse at once, that he might lose no time in beginning his
investigations.

"If it were my good fortune to unearth a cranium of the Homo primogenus, I
should be the happiest man in the world," declared McArthur, clasping his
fingers in ecstasy at the thought of such unparalleled bliss.

"What did I tell you?" said Smith, accompanying Tubbs to the corral. "He's
tryin' to win himself a home."

"Looks that way," Tubbs agreed. "These here bug-hunters is deep."

The saddle blanket which Tubbs pulled from their wagon and threw upon the
ground, with McArthur's saddle, caught Smith's eye instantly, because of
the similarity in color and markings to that which he had folded so
carefully inside his own. This was newer, it had no disfiguring holes, or
black stain in the corner.

"What's the use of takin' chances?" he asked himself as he looked it
over.

While Tubbs was catching the horse in the corral, Smith def