Me Smith

with a kind of boyish impulsiveness, “if ever you see me doin’ anything I oughtn’t, like settin’ down when I ought to stand up, or standin’ up when I ought to set down, will you just rope me and take a turn around a snubbin’-post and jerk me off my feet?”
    “We’ll get along famously if you really want to improve yourself!” exclaimed the Schoolmarm, her eyes shining with enthusiasm. “If you really and truly want to learn.”
    “Really and truly I do,” Smith echoed, feeling at the moment that he would have done dressmaking or taken in washing, had she bid him.
    Once more the world looked big, alluring, and as full of untried possibilities as when he had “quit the flat” at thirteen.
    “Have you noticed me doin’ anything that isn’t manners?” he asked in humble anxiety. “Don’t be afraid of hurtin’ my feelin’s,” he urged, “for I ain’t none.”
    “If you honestly want me to tell you things, I will; but it seems so—so queer upon such a very short acquaintance.”
    “Shucks! What’s the use of wastin’ time pretendin’ to get acquainted, when you’re acquainted as soon as you look at each other? What’s the use of sashayin’ around the bush when you meet up with somebody you like? You just cut loose on me, girl.”
    “It’s only a little thing, in a way, and not in itself important perhaps; yet it would be, too, if circumstances should take you into the world. It might make a bad impression upon strangers.”
    Smith looked slightly alarmed. He wondered if she suspected anything about White Antelope. At the moment, he could think of nothing else he had done within the last twenty-four hours, which might prejudice strangers.
    “I noticed at the table,” the Schoolmarm went on in some embarrassment, “that you held your fork as though you were afraid it would get away from you. Like this”—she illustrated with her fist.
    “Like a ranch-hand holdin’ onto a pitch-fork,” Smith suggested, relieved.
    “Something,” she laughed. “It should be like this. Anyway,” she declared encouragingly, “you don’t eat with your knife.”
    Smith beamed.
    “Did you notice that?”
    “Naturally, in a land of sword-swallowers, I would;” the Schoolmarm made a wry face.
    “Once I run with a high-stepper from Bowlin’ Green, Kentucky, and she told me better nor that,” he explained. “She said nothin’ give a feller away like his habit of handlin’ tools at the table. She was a lady all right, but she got the dope habit and threw the lamp at me. The way I quit her didn’t trouble me . None of ’em ever had any holt on me when it come to a show-down; but you, girl, you ——”
    “Look!”
    Her sharp exclamation interrupted him, and, following her gesture, he saw a flying horseman in the distance, riding as for his life, while behind him two other riders quirted their horses in hot pursuit.
    “Is it a race—for fun?”
    “I don’t think it,” Smith replied dryly, noting the direction from which they came. “It looks like business.”
    He knew that the two behind were Indians. He could tell by the way they used their quirts and sat their horses. Neither was there any mistaking the bug-hunter on his ewe-necked sorrel, which, displaying unexpected bursts of speed, was keeping in the lead and heading straight for the ranch-house. With one hand McArthur was clinging to the saddle-horn, and with the other was clinging quite as tightly to what at a distance appeared to be a carbine.
    “He’s pulled his gun—why don’t he use it?” Smith quickened his horse’s gait.
    He knew that the Indians had learned White Antelope’s fate. That was a lucky swap Smith had made that morning. He congratulated himself that he had not “taken chances.” He wondered how effective McArthur’s denial would prove in the face of the evidence furnished by the saddle-blanket. Personally, Smith regarded the bug-hunter’s chances as slim.
    “They’ll get him in the corral,” he observed.
    “Oh, it’s Mr. McArthur!” Dora cried in distress.
    Smith looked at her in quick jealousy.
    “Well, what of it?” In her excitement, the gruffness of his tone passed unobserved.
    “Come,” she urged. “The Indians are angry, and he may need us.”
    Hatless, breathless, pale, McArthur rolled out of his saddle and thrust a long, bleached bone into Tubbs’s hand.
    “Keep it!” he gasped. “Protect it! It may be—I don’t say it is, but it may be—a portion of the paroccipital