or sure. W'at's his lay? You trail in,
Cricket, and see how many cards he draws. You're up against it,
anyhow. You got a nickel and gallopin' consumption, and you better
lay low. Lay low and see w'at's his game."

At Rincon, a hundred miles from San Antonio, they left the train for a
buckboard which was waiting there for Raidler. In this they travelled
the thirty miles between the station and their destination. If
anything could, this drive should have stirred the acrimonious McGuire
to a sense of his ransom. They sped upon velvety wheels across an
exhilarant savanna. The pair of Spanish ponies struck a nimble,
tireless trot, which gait they occasionally relieved by a wild,
untrammelled gallop. The air was wine and seltzer, perfumed, as they
absorbed it, with the delicate redolence of prairie flowers. The road
perished, and the buckboard swam the uncharted billows of the grass
itself, steered by the practised hand of Raidler, to whom each tiny
distant mott of trees was a signboard, each convolution of the low
hills a voucher of course and distance. But McGuire reclined upon his
spine, seeing nothing but a desert, and receiving the cattleman's
advances with sullen distrust. "W'at's he up to?" was the burden of
his thoughts; "w'at kind of a gold brick has the big guy got to sell?"
McGuire was only applying the measure of the streets he had walked to
a range bounded by the horizon and the fourth dimension.

A week before, while riding the prairies, Raidler had come upon a sick
and weakling calf deserted and bawling. Without dismounting he had
reached and slung the distressed bossy across his saddle, and dropped
it at the ranch for the boys to attend to. It was impossible for
McGuire to know or comprehend that, in the eyes of the cattleman, his
case and that of the calf were identical in interest and demand upon
his assistance. A creature was ill and helpless; he had the power to
render aid--these were the only postulates required for the cattleman
to act. They formed his system of logic and the most of his creed.
McGuire was the seventh invalid whom Raidler had picked up thus
casually in San Antonio, where so many thousand go for the ozone that
is said to linger about its contracted streets. Five of them had been
guests of Solito Ranch until they had been able to leave, cured or
better, and exhausting the vocabulary of tearful gratitude. One came
too late, but rested very comfortably, at last, under a ratama tree in
the