Me Smith

to beat the world,” he muttered, “but I hates the shape of the Cree moccasin. The Piegans make better.” He tossed it from him contemptuously and picked up the shotgun.
    “No good.” He threw it down and straightened the Indian’s head with the toe of his boot. “I despises to lie cramped up, myself.”
    Returning to his horse, he removed his saddle, and folded the Indian’s blanket inside of his own. Then he recinched his saddle, and turned his horse’s head to the southeast, where “the full-blood—the woman, the fat woman—lived in a log cabin by running water.”
    He glanced over his shoulder as he spurred his horse to a gallop.
    “I’m a killer, me—Smith,” he said, and grinned.
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    II
ON THE ALKALI HILL
    There was at least an hour and a half of daylight left when Smith struck a wagon-road. He looked each way doubtfully. The woman’s house was quite as likely to be to the right as to the left; there was no way of telling. While he hesitated, his horse lifted its ears. Smith also thought he heard voices. Swinging his horse to the right, he rode to the edge of the bench where the road made a steep and sudden drop.
    At the bottom of the hill he saw a driver on the spring-seat of a round-up wagon urging two lean-necked and narrow-chested horses up the hill. They were smooth-shod, and, the weight of the wagon being out of all proportion to their strength, they fell often in their futile struggles. At the side of the road near the top of the hill the water oozed from an alkali spring, which kept the road perpetually muddy. The horses were straining every nerve and muscle, their eyes bulging and nostrils distended, and still the driver, loudmouthed and vacuously profane, lashed them mercilessly with the stinging thongs of his leather whip. Smith, from the top of the hill, watched him with a sneer on his face.
    “He drives like a Missourian,” he muttered.
    He could have helped the troubled driver, knowing perfectly well what to do, but it would have entailed an effort which he did not care to make. It was nothing to him whether the round-up wagon got up the hill that night—or never.
    Smith thought the driver was alone until he began to back the team to rush the hill once more. Then he heard angry exclamations coming from the rear of the wagon—exclamations which sounded not unlike the buzzing of an enraged bumble-bee. He stretched his neck and saw that which suggested an overgrown hoop-snake rolling down the hill. At the bottom a little mud-coated man stood up. The part of his face that was visible above his beard was pale with anger. His brown eyes gleamed behind mud-splashed spectacles.
    “Oscar Tubbs,” he demanded, “why did you not tell me that you were about to back the wagon?”
    “I would have did it if I had knowed myself that the team were goin’ to back,” replied Tubbs, in the conciliatory tone of one who addresses the man who pays him his wages.
    The man in spectacles groaned. “Three inexcusable errors in one sentence. Oscar Tubbs, you are hopeless!”
    “Yep,” replied that person resignedly; “nobody never could learn me nothin’. Onct I knowed——”
    “Stop! We have no time for a reminiscence. Have you any reason to believe that we can get up this hill to-night?”
    “No chanst of it. These buzzard-heads has drawed every poun’ they kin pull. But I has some reason to believe that if you don’t hist your hoofs out’n that mud-hole, you’ll bog down. You’re up to your pant-leg now. Onct I knowed——”
    The little man threw out his hand in a restraining gesture, and Tubbs, foiled again, closed his lips and watched his employer stand back on one leg while he pulled the other out of the mud with a long, sucking sound.
    “What for an outfit is that, anyhow?” mused Smith, watching the proceedings with some interest. “He looks like one of them bug-hunters. He’s got a pair of shoulders on him like a drink of water, and his legs look like the runnin’-gears of a katydid.”
    So intently were they all engaged in watching the man’s struggles that no one observed a girl on a galloping horse until she was almost upon them. She sat her sturdy, spirited pony like a cowboy. She was about sixteen, with a suggestion of boyishness in her appearance. Her brown hair, worn in a single braid, was bleached to a lighter shade on top, as if she rode always with bared head. Her eyes were gray, in curious contrast to a tawny skin. She was slight to scrawniness, and, one