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I'd rather be High Lord Chancellor of a cow-camp than the eight-spot in a queen-high flush. It's your ranch; and Barber gets the beeves." Webb's horse was tied to the rack. He walked into the house and brought out his roll of blankets that he never took with him except on long rides, and his "slicker," and his longest stake-rope of plaited raw-hide.
The only hope of escape, and that far from brilliant, as he remembered the long desert ride from the distant cow-camp on the Cimarron, lay in immediate departure. Every moment of delay served to increase their peril.
He never had been in a cow-camp before in his life, but there was something in the air of it, in the dignified ignoring of the evident hardships of such a life that told him he was among his kind. The cook was a different type of man from the others, and seemed to have been pitched into the game like the last pawn of a desperate player.
And the cow-camp was still Simsby's when the locating engineers of the Western Pacific, searching for tank stations in a land where water was scarce and hard to come by, drove their stakes along the north line of the quarter-section; and having named their last station Alphonse, christened this one Gaston.
That "Yes, ma'am," especially disturbed her. Then she remembered a novel she had read and her mind jumped to a conclusion. She leaned forward. "Say, aren't you from the West?" "Yes, ma'am." "You weren't ever a cowboy, were you?" Pierre smiled. "Yes, ma'am. I was raised in a cow-camp. I was a cowboy till about seven years ago when I took to ranchin'." "Where was that?" "Out in Wyoming."
Weary, still planting his feet primly upon the trampled grass, went smiling up to the stupefied Patsy. "Lord, how I do love a big, fat, shiny Dutch cook!" he murmured, and flung his long arms around him in a hug that caused Patsy to grunt. "How yuh was, already, Dutchy? Got any pie in this man's cow-camp?"
He was one of the type already mentioned that knows but two or three kinds of feed. As time went on he became thinner and thinner. The other horses prospered, but Tunemah failed. He actually did not know enough to take care of himself; and could not learn. Finally, when about two months out, we traded him at a cow-camp for a little buckskin called Monache. So much for the saddle-horses.
"I calc'late you can," he agreed in his soft, friendly drawl. "Sit down and turn your good ear this way, Applehead, so this story can soak in. You'll see where you come in as sheriff, and you'll sabe just what you'll have to do. Bud, here, will be the outlaw that blows into the cow-camp and begins to mix things. He's the one you'll have to settle. So here's the way the story runs:"
"If you'd go out in a cow-camp fer a couple of months it would do you a world of good," Pinkey advised her. "You'd fatten up." Mr. Budlong, who had gotten in the coach, got out again to inquire of Pinkey if he was sure the horses were perfectly gentle. "I'd trust my own step-mother behind 'em anywhere." Mr.
In such an unheard-of predicament he felt dimly that he had need of much thought. When not even his hat could shield him from the sun glare, he got up and went nipping awkwardly over the hot beach. He was going into the next river-bottom wherever that was on the chance of finding a cow-camp, or some cabin where he could, by some means, clothe himself.
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