rning at daybreak I stretched it here in the
stall and rubbed it until it shone. Now it is here, Senor, where no
knife-point can steal into it and cunningly cut the strands that are
hidden, so that the senor would not observe and would place faith upon
it and be betrayed." Diego lifted his loose, linen shirt and disclosed
the riata coiled about his middle.

The eyes of his god, when they rested upon the brown body wrapped round
and round with the rawhide on which his life would later hang, were
softer than they had been since he had craved the kiss that had been
denied him, many hours before. It was only the blind worship and the
loyalty of a peon whose feet were bare, whose hands were calloused with
labor, whose face was seamed with the harshness of his serfdom. Only a
peon's loyalty; but something hard and bitter and reckless, something
that might have proved a more serious handicap than a strange riata,
dropped away from Jack's mood and left him very nearly his normal self.
It was as if the warmth of the rawhide struck through the chill which
Teresita's unreasoning spite had brought to the heart of him, and left
there a little glow.

"Gracias, Diego," he said, and smiled in the way that made one love him.
"Let it stay until I have need of it. It will surely fly true, to-day,
since it has been warmed thus by thy friendship."

From an impulse of careless kindness he said it, even though he had been
touched by the peon's anxiety for his welfare. But Diego's heart was
near to bursting with gratitude and pride; those last two words--he
would not have exchanged the memory of them for the gold medal itself.
That his blue-eyed god should address him, a mere peon, as "thy," the
endearing, intimate pronoun kept for one's friends! The tears stood in
Diego's black eyes when he heard; and Diego was no weakling, but a
straight-backed stoic of an Indian, who stood almost as tall as the
Senor Jack himself and who could throw a full-grown steer to the ground
by twisting its head. He bowed low and turned to fumble the sweet, dried
grasses in Surry's manger; and beneath his coarse shirt the feel of the
rawhide was sweeter than the embrace of a loved woman.

"You want to take mighty good care of this little nag of mine," Dade
observed irrelevantly, his fingers combing wistfully the crinkly mane.
"There'll never be another like him in this world. And if there was, it
wouldn't be him."

"I reckon it's asking a good deal of you, to th