you! I don't want to go on rodeo, nohow."

"I know that, all right," snapped Dade, and started off with his hat
tilted over his eyes. No one, he reminded himself, would want to spend a
month or so riding the range when he could stay and philander with as
pretty a Spanish girl as ever played the game of cat-and-mouse with a
man. And Jack never had been the kind to go looking for trouble; truth
to tell, he had never found it necessary, for trouble usually flew to
meet him as a needle flies to the magnet.

But, a wound is not necessarily a deadly one because it sends
excruciating pain-signals to a man's heart and brain; and love seldom is
fatal, however painful it may be. Dade was slowly recovering, under the
rather heroic treatment of watching his successor writhe and exult by
turns, as the mood of the maiden might decree. Strong medicine, that, to
be swallowed with a wry face, if you will; but it is guaranteed to cure
if the sufferer is not a mental and moral weakling.

Dade was quite ready to go out to rodeo work; indeed, he was anxious to
go. But, not being a morbid young man, he did not contemplate carrying a
broken heart with him. Teresita was sweet and winsome and maddeningly
alluring; he knew it, he felt it still. Indeed, he was made to realize
it every time the whim seized her to punish Jack by smiling upon Dade.
But she was as capricious as beauty usually is, and he knew that also;
and after being used several times as a club with which to beat Jack
into proper humility (and always seeing very clearly that he was merely
the club and nothing more) he had almost reached the point where he
could shrug shoulders philosophically at her coquetry; and what is
better, do it without bitterness. At least, he could do it when he had
not seen her for several hours, which made rodeo time a relief for which
he was grateful.

What hurt him most, just now, was the constraint between him and Jack;
time was when Jack would have told him immediately of any unpleasant
meeting with Jose. It never occurred to Dade that he himself had
fostered the constraint by his moody aloofness when he was fighting the
first jealous resentment he had ever felt against the other in the years
of their constant companionship. An unexpected slap on the shoulder
almost sent him headlong.

"Say, old man, I didn't mean it," Jack began contritely, referring
perhaps to his petulant speech, rather than to his mode of making his
presence known. "But--com