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Updated: July 3, 2025
Jack raised his head with a returning sense of his surroundings to see some mounted men, eight in all he counted, riding along the range trail a half mile nearer the water-hole than themselves. Their horses had the gait of exhaustion after a long, hard ride. "You know who it is?" Firio whispered. "Yes," Jack answered. "They had the better trail and have outridden us. All right, Firio!"
"Yes. Food for a week and two-days' water." It pleased Jack to hang the portraits while Firio was putting on Jag Ear's pack; and he made it a ceremony in which his silence was uninterrupted by the comments of the ranchers.
But often he would go out among the sagebrush and return with a feathery tribute, which he would broil on a spit in a fire made in the yard. Always when Jack rode out to meet Mary at the foot of the range, Firio would follow; and always he had his rifle. For it was part of Jack's seeming inconsistency, emphasizing his inscrutability, that he would never wear his revolver.
After all, it was only a raised patch of blue, a blemish removable by the slightest surgical operation which its owner must have preferred to retain. Firio and Nogales, also riding side by side, were also silent. There was no sound except Jag Ear's bells, now sunk to a faint tinkle in keeping with the slow progress of Prather's beaten horse.
"It will be all right!" he called out to the crowd in his yard; for the others who had met him at the station were waiting for him there. "Bob, those umbrella-trees could shade a thin, short man now, even if he didn't hug the trunk! Firio has done well, hasn't he?" he concluded, after he had walked through the garden and surveyed the fields and orchards in fond comparison as to progress.
"All things in their turn and time." "Sí!" answered Firio. All things in their turn and time! This desert truth was bred in him through his ancestry, no less than in the Eternal Painter himself.
He seized Firio by the shoulders and looked narrowly at him, and Firio met the gaze with soft, puzzling lights in his eyes. "Ho! ho! A big sadness! How do you know?" he laughed. "I learn on the trail when I watch you look at the stars. And Señorita Ewold, she know; but she think the big sadness a devil. She " and he paused. "She yes?" Jack asked. "She " Firio started again.
"Sí!" answered Firio, as if he had just as soon there were a regiment against them. He was happy beyond words. He patted his rifle barrel; he spread out his big red bandanna beside his elbow and on it nicely arranged a couple of extra charges of cartridges. Prather remained flat on the bottom of the arroyo, overwhelmed. It was some time before he could speak. "I I don't understand!
With one problem forever solved, he was absorbed in another. "Leddy drinks, eats, waits!" whispered Firio. "If we try to go they hunt us down!" "Yes," said Jack. "And we not go, eh? We stay? We fight?" "For water, Firio, yes! Two against seven!" "Sí!" Firio had no illusions about the situation. "Sí!" he repeated stoically.
Jack was the first to speak, and his voice returned to the casual key. "Usually I watch the sunset while we make camp," he said. "I am very late to-night late beyond all habit; and sunset and sunrise do make one a creature of habit out here. Firio and my little train will grow impatient waiting for me."
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