Me Smith

Babe, “I’d hold up trains or rob dudes or do ’most any old thing. Say, I’ve rid by sheep-wagons when I was durn near starvin’ ruther than eat with a sheep-herder or owe one a favor. Where do you find a man like the Colonel in sheep?” demanded Babe. “You don’t find ’em. Nothin’ but a lot of upstart sheep-herders, that’s got rich in five years and don’t know how to act.”
    “Oh, you’re prejudiced, Babe. Not all sheepmen are muckers any more than all cattlemen are gentlemen.”
    “I’m not prejudiced a- tall !” declared Babe excitedly. “I’m perfectly fair and square. Woolers is demoralizin’. Associate with woolers, and it takes the spirit out of a feller quicker’n cookin.’ In five years you won’t be half the man you are now if you go into sheep. I’ll sure hate to see it!” His voice was all but pathetic as he contemplated Ralston’s downfall.
    “I think you will, though, Babe, if I get out of this with a whole hide.”
    “You’ll be so well fixed you can git married then?” There was some constraint in Babe’s tone, which he meant to be casual.
    Ralston’s heart gave him a twinge of pain.
    “I s’pose you’ve had every chance to git acquainted with the Schoolmarm,” he observed, since Ralston did not reply.
    “She doesn’t like me, Babe.”
    “ What !” yelled Babe, screwing up his face in a grimace of surprise and unbelief.
    “She would rather talk to Ling than to me—at least, she seems far more friendly to any one else than to me.”
    “Say, she must be loony not to like you!”
    Ralston could not help laughing outright at Babe’s vigorous loyalty.
    “It’s not necessarily a sign of insanity to dislike me.”
    “She doesn’t go that far, does she?” demanded Babe.
    “Sometimes I think so.”
    “You don’t care a-tall, do you?”
    “Yes,” Ralston replied quietly; “I care a great deal. It hurts me more than I ever was hurt before; because, you see, Babe, I never loved a woman before.”
    “Aw-w-w,” replied Babe, in deepest sympathy.
    Smith had congratulated himself often during the day upon the fact that he could not have chosen a more propitious time for the execution of his plans—at least, so far as the Bar C outfit was concerned. His uneasiness passed as the protecting darkness fell without their having seen a single person the entire day.
    When the last glimmer of daylight had faded, Tubbs and Smith started on the drive, heading the cattle direct for their destination. They were fatter than Smith had supposed, so they could not travel as rapidly as he had calculated, but he and Tubbs pushed them along as fast as they could without overheating them.
    The darkness, which gave Smith courage, made Tubbs nervous. He swore at the cattle, he swore at his horse, he swore at the rocks over which his horse stumbled; and he constantly strained his roving eyes to penetrate the darkness for pursuers. Every gulch and gully held for him a fresh terror.
    “Gee! I wisht I was out of this onct!” burst from him when the howl of a wolf set his nerves jangling.
    “What’d you say?” Smith stopped in the middle of a song he was singing.
    “I said I wisht I was down where the monkeys are throwin’ nuts! I’m chilly,” declared Tubbs.
    “Chilly? It’s hot!”
    Smith was light-hearted, sanguine. He told himself that perhaps it was as well, after all, that the hold-ups had got off with the “old woman’s” money. She might have made trouble when she found that he meant to go or had gone with Dora.
    “You can’t tell about women,” Smith said to himself. “They’re like ducks: no two fly alike.”
    He felt secure, yet from force of habit his hand frequently sought his cartridge-belt, his rifle in its scabbard, his six-shooter in the holster under his arm. And while he serenely hummed the songs of the dance-halls and round-up camps, two silent figures, so close that they heard the clacking of the cattle’s split hoofs, Tubbs’s vacuous oaths, Smith’s contented voice, were following with the business-like persistency of the law.
    The four mounted men rode all night, speaking seldom, each thinking his own thoughts, dreaming his own dreams. Not until the faintest light grayed the east did the pursuers fall behind.
    “We’re not more’n a mile to water now”—Smith had made sure of his country this time—“and we’ll hold the cattle in the brush and take turns watchin’.”
    “It’s a go with me,” answered Tubbs, yawning until