hardly crawl out of my sleeping-bag. My bones
ached, my muscles protested excruciatingly, my lips burned and bled,
and the cold I had contracted on the desert clung to me. A good brisk
walk round the corrals, and then breakfast, made me feel better.

"Of course you can ride?" queried Frank.

My answer was not given from an overwhelming desire to be truthful.
Frank frowned a little, as it wondering how a man could have the nerve
to start out on a jaunt with Buffalo Jones without being a good
horseman. To be unable to stick on the back of a wild mustang, or a
cayuse, was an unpardonable sin in Arizona. My frank admission was made
relatively, with my mind on what cowboys held as a standard of
horsemanship.

The mount Frank trotted out of the corral for me was a pure white,
beautiful mustang, nervous, sensitive, quivering. I watched Frank put
on the saddle, and when he called me I did not fail to catch a covert
twinkle in his merry brown eyes. Looking away toward Buckskin Mountain,
which was coincidentally in the direction of home, I said to myself:
"This may be where you get on, but most certainly it is where you get
off!"

Jones was already riding far beyond the corral, as I could see by a
cloud of dust; and I set off after him, with the painful consciousness
that I must have looked to Frank and Jim much as Central Park
equestrians had often looked to me. Frank shouted after me that he
would catch up with us out on the range. I was not in any great hurry
to overtake Jones, but evidently my horse's inclinations differed from
mine; at any rate, he made the dust fly, and jumped the little sage
bushes.

Jones, who had tarried to inspect one of the pools--formed of running
water from the corrals--greeted me as I came up with this cheerful
observation.

"What in thunder did Frank give you that white nag for? The buffalo
hate white horses--anything white. They're liable to stampede off the
range, or chase you into the canyon."

I replied grimly that, as it was certain something was going to happen,
the particular circumstance might as well come off quickly.

We rode over the rolling plain with a cool, bracing breeze in our
faces. The sky was dull and mottled with a beautiful cloud effect that
presaged wind. As we trotted along Jones pointed out to me and
descanted upon the nutritive value of three different kinds of grass,
one of which he called the Buffalo Pea, noteworthy for a beautiful blue
blossom. Soon we passed