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The guardian angel who cares for the "tenderfoot" was good to Patches that day, and favored him with many sagging wires and leaning or broken posts, so that he could not ride far. Being painstaking and conscientious in his work, he had made not more than four miles by the beginning of the afternoon. Then he found a break that would occupy him for two hours at least.
While he realized the necessity for haste if he was to succeed in levanting with the gold, the tenderfoot had been too long a slave to his creature comforts to face another day without breakfast. He abstracted some grub from one of the packs and stayed the pangs of hunger. Then he bathed his blistered feet, filled the water kegs, rounded up his pack train and departed up the draw.
"Oh, what a big derrick! How many quarts of oil does that pump in a day, Uncle Dick?" Mr. Gordon laughed heartily. "Little Miss Tenderfoot!" he teased. "I thought you knew, goosie, that we measured oil by barrels. That well is flowing slightly over five thousand barrels a day. Altogether our wells are now yielding well over fifty thousand barrels of oil a day."
You see, there ain't such a lot that happens to other people occurrin' on a ranch, and we was really more excited over Aleck and his girl than a tenderfoot would be over a gun fight, and for the same reason; it was out of our ordinary. "Scraggsy didn't keep us on the anxious seat. He was the surest thing I ever saw.
In a degree no whit inferior to the variegated river life, the life of the West furnished contrasts and incongruities innumerable vaster perhaps, and more significant. There was the incessant contrast of civilization with barbarism, of the East with the West; and there was infinite play for the comic expose of the credulous "tenderfoot" at the hands of the pitiless cowboy.
"The sour old grouch," affirmed Phil Marvin. "Sure, we know him." "I know him, too," said Sandy. "I worked for the tenderfoot that he skinned out of the ranch. And then I worked for Lewison. If they's anything good about Lewison, you'd need a spyglass to find it, and then it wouldn't be fit to see.
He was a beautiful type of the tenderfoot. The redeeming point of the tenderfoot is his humbleness of spirit and his extreme good nature. He exasperates you with his fool performances to the point of dancing cursing wild crying rage, and then accepts your well, reproofs so meekly that you come off the boil as though some one had removed you from the fire, and you feel like a low-browed thug.
Ashton can ride," interposed the girl, with a friendliness of tone that brought Gowan to a thin-lipped silence. "That's something," said Knowles, gazing speculatively at the slim aristocratic figure of the tenderfoot. "You're not built for pitching hay, but like as not you have the makings of a puncher. Ever throw a rope?" "Never. I shall start practicing the art at once."
I'll take one hundred thousand dollars for the Circle Bar." The calm announcement had no effect upon Dunlavey except to cause him to grin derisively. "For a tenderfoot you're pretty slick," he allowed, his teeth showing. "You've figgered it out so that it sounds right reasonable. But you've forgot one thing. The Cattlemen's Association ain't eliminated.
"Well, I reckon a sour-dough prospector wouldn't have bothered about a tent. Looks as if one of them was a tenderfoot. Qu'en pense-tu?" The Metis' keen eyes had wandered round the camp and he nodded. "But, yes! Dat man sait vivre; he lak' it comfortable." "A city man!" Thirlwell remarked, with a frown. How many packers?" "Quat," said the Metis. "Voyageurs?"
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