ger--she's the finest little lady between the Rio Grande and next
Christmas--but a man ought to be boss of his own camp."

The smooth, brown face of Yeager lengthened to a mask of wounded
melancholy. With that expression, and his rumpled yellow hair and
guileless blue eyes, he might have been likened to a schoolboy whose
leadership had been usurped by a youngster of superior strength. But his
active and sinewy seventy-two inches, and his girded revolvers forbade
the comparison.

"What was that you called me, Baldy?" he asked. "What kind of a concert
was it?"

"A 'consort,'" corrected Baldy--"a 'prince-consort.' It's a kind of
short-card pseudonym. You come in sort of between Jack-high and a
four-card flush."

Webb Yeager sighed, and gathered the strap of his Winchester scabbard
from the floor.

"I'm ridin' back to the ranch to-day," he said half-heartedly. "I've
got to start a bunch of beeves for San Antone in the morning."

"I'm your company as far as Dry Lake," announced Baldy. "I've got a
round-up camp on the San Marcos cuttin' out two-year-olds."

The two _companeros_ mounted their ponies and trotted away from the
little railroad settlement, where they had foregathered in the thirsty
morning.

At Dry Lake, where their routes diverged, they reined up for a parting
cigarette. For miles they had ridden in silence save for the soft drum
of the ponies' hoofs on the matted mesquite grass, and the rattle of
the chaparral against their wooden stirrups. But in Texas discourse
is seldom continuous. You may fill in a mile, a meal, and a murder
between your paragraphs without detriment to your thesis. So, without
apology, Webb offered an addendum to the conversation that had begun
ten miles away.

"You remember, yourself, Baldy, that there was a time when Santa
wasn't quite so independent. You remember the days when old McAllister
was keepin' us apart, and how she used to send me the sign that she
wanted to see me? Old man Mac promised to make me look like a colander
if I ever come in gun-shot of the ranch. You remember the sign she
used to send, Baldy--the heart with a cross inside of it?"

"Me?" cried Baldy, with intoxicated archness. "You old sugar-stealing
coyote! Don't I remember! Why, you dad-blamed old long-horned
turtle-dove, the boys in camp was all cognoscious about them hiroglyphs.
The 'gizzard-and-crossbones' we used to call it. We used to see 'em on
truck that was sent out from the ranch. They was mark