o collect;
but I got a lot--enough to pay for the trouble of coming down." He
rolled over upon his back and lay smoking and looking up into the
mottled branches of the tree; thought of something, and lifted himself
to an elbow so that he faced Jack.

"Sa-ay, I thought you said you was going to kill that greaser," he
challenged quizzically.

Jack shrugged his shoulders, took two long draws on his cigarette, and
blew one of his pet smoke-rings. "I did." He moistened his lips and blew
another ring. "At least, I killed the biggest part of him--and that's
his pride."

Bill grunted, lay down again, and stared up at the wide-pronged sycamore
leaves. "Darn my oldest sister's cat's eyes if I ever seen anything like
it!" he exploded suddenly, and closed his eyes in a vast content.

From the barbecue pits there came an appetizing odor of roasting beef;
high-keyed voices flung good-humored taunts, and once they heard a great
shout of laughter surge through the crowd gathered there. From the great
platform built under a group of live oaks near the patio they heard the
resonant plunk-plunk-plunk of a harp making ready for the dance, and the
shrill laughter of slim senoritas hovering there. Down the slope before
the three the shadows stretched longer and longer. A violin twanged in
the tuning, the harp-strings crooning the key.

"You fellows are going to dance, ain't yuh?" Bill inquired lazily, when
his cigar was half gone to ashes and smoke. "Jack, here, can get
pardners enough to keep him going fer a week--judging by the eyes them
Spanish girls have been making at him since the duel and the
horse-breaking.

"Say! How about that sassy-eyed Picardo girl? I ain't seen you and her
in speaking distance all day; and the way you was buzzing around her
when I was down here before--"

"Say, Jack," Dade interrupted, diplomacy winning against politeness, "I
never dreamed you'd have the nerve to try that fancy corkscrew throw of
yours before all that crowd. Why, after two years to get out of
practice, you took an awful chance of making a fool of yourself! Y'see,
Bill," he explained with a deliberate garrulity, "that throw he made
when he caught the horse was the finest bit of rope-work that's been
done to-day. I don't believe there's another man in the crowd that could
do it; and the chances are they never saw it done before, even! I know I
never saw but one man beside Jack that could do it. Jack was always at
it, when we happened to b