Me Smith

horse was stumbling oftener, but he felt no pity—only irritation that it had not more stamina. A sort of numbness, the lethargy of great weakness, was creeping over him; his heart was sagging with a dull despair. He believed that he must be lost, yet he was past cursing or complaining aloud. Only an occasional gasp or a fretful, inarticulate sound came when his horse stumbled badly.
    He thought he saw a barbed wire fence. A barbed wire fence meant civilization! He swung his horse and rode toward it. The dark spots he had thought were posts were only sage-brush. The smarting of his eye-balls and eyelids aroused him to an astonishing fact: he was crying in his weakness, crying of disappointment like a child! But he was astonished most that he had tears to shed—that they had not dried up like his blood.
    Tears! He remembered his last tears, and they kept on sliding down his cheek now as he recalled the occasion. His father had given him a colt back there where they slept between sheets. He had broken it himself, and taught it tricks. It whinnied to him when he passed the stable. The other boys envied him his colt, and he meant to show it at the fair. He came home one day and the colt was gone. His father handed him a silver dollar. He had thrown the money at his father and struck him in the face, and while the tears streamed from his eyes he had cursed his father with the oaths with which his father had so frequently cursed him; and he had kept on cursing until he was beaten into unconsciousness. There had been no love between them, ever, but he had not expected that. Since then there had been no time or inclination for tears, for it was then he had “quit the flat.” The rage of his boyhood came back to Smith as he thought of it now. He swore, though it hurt him to speak.
    His eyes were still smarting when he raised them to see a horseman on a distant ridge. The sight roused him like a stimulant. Was he friend or foe? He reined his horse, and, drawing his rifle from its scabbard, waited; for the stranger had seen him and was riding toward him down the ridge.
    “If he ain’t my kind, I’ll have to stop him,” Smith muttered.
    The strength of excitement came to him, and once more he sat erect in the saddle, fingering the trigger as the horseman came steadily on.
    “He rides like a Texican,” Smith thought. There was something familiar in the stranger’s outlines, the way he threw his weight in one stirrup, but Smith was taking no chances. He put out a hand in warning, and the other man stopped.
    The swarthy face of the stranger wore a comprehending grin. No honest man drove horses across the Bad Lands. He threw the Indian sign of friendship to Smith, and they each advanced.
    “How far to water, Clayt?”
    “Well, dog-gone me! Smith!”
    “How far to water?” Smith yelled the words in hoarse ferocity.
    The stranger glanced at the barebacked horses, and then at the shimmering heat waves of the desert.
    “Just around the ridge,” he answered. “My God, man, didn’t you pack water?”
    But Smith was already out of hearing.
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    XVI
TINHORN FRANK SMELLS MONEY
    Smith did not care for money in itself; that is, he did not care for it enough to work for it, or to hoard it when he had it. Yet perhaps even more than most persons he loved the feel of it in his fingers, the sensation of having it in his pocket. Smith was vain, in his way, and money satisfied his vanity. It gave him prestige, power, the attention he craved. He could call any flashy talker’s bluff when his pockets were full of money. It imparted self-assurance. He could the better indulge his propensity for resenting slights, either real or fancied. Money would buy him out of trouble. Yes, Smith liked the feel of money. He took a roll of banknotes from the belt pocket of his leather chaps and counted them for the third time.
    “I’ll buy a few drinks, flash this wad on them pinheads in town, and then I’ll soak it away.” He returned the roll to his pocket with an expression of satisfaction upon his face.
    He had done well with the horses. The “boys” had paid him a third more than he had expected; they had done so, he knew, as an incentive to further transactions. And Smith had outlined a plan to them which had made their eyes sparkle.
    “It’s risky, but if you can do it——” they had said.
    “Sure, I can do it, and I’ll start as soon as it’s safe after I get back to the ranch. I gotta get to work and make a stake— me ,”