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"What work to-day?" he asked, as he cleared away the breakfast dishes. "What has Señor Jack planned for us to do?" "The work to-day? The work to-day?" Jack repeated absently. "First the mail." He nodded toward a pile on the table. "And I shall make ready to stay a long time?" Firio insinuated softly. "No!" Jack answered to space.
Then Nogales started back with his head thrown up jubilantly, but stopped when he was within calling distance and sang out, truculently: "Leddy get you both! He get everything!" He turned on his heel and soon was another lump around the water-hole. "That makes nine, Firio!" said Jack. He smiled in relief to be rid of Nogales; smiled in happy confidence, as if he were truly the ancestor's child.
"I believe they are at home," said Jack, with a fond look from one to the other, when Firio came to say that everything was ready. "Señor Jack," whispered Firio insinuatingly, "for the trail you wear the grand, glad trail clothes and the big spurs. I keep them shiny the big spurs!"
Perhaps the external signs are only the last stand of a lugubriousness driven out by overwhelming forces of internal joy." "Sí, sí!" said Firio. "Firio, you are eminently a conversationalist," said Jack. "You agree with any foolishness as if it were a new theory of ethics. You are an ideal companion. I never have to listen to you in order that I may in turn have my say." "Sí," said Firio.
Of this alone you could be sure from the resoluteness of his features, that he was going straight on; while Firio, in the telepathy of desert companionship, understood that he was missing no developing detail within the narrow range of vision in front of P.D.'s nose. Trusting all to Jack, Firio was on wires, ready for a spring in any direction.
When Firio was well enough to walk out he was to be found in a long chair on Jack's porch, ever raising a warning finger for silence to anyone who approached and looking out across the yard to Jag Ear, who was winning back the fat he had lost in a constitutional crisis, and P.D., who, after bearing himself first and last in a manner characteristic of a pony who was P.D. but never Q., seemed already none the worse for the hardships he had endured.
He wrote to Firio in resolute assertion that he would never require the services of P.D. again, when he knew that Firio, despite the protests, would still keep P.D. fit for the trail. He wrote to Jim Galway how immersed he was in his new career, but that he might come for a while for a little while, with emphasis if ever Jim wired that he was needed.
"The best I ever knew an Indian to do!" said Jim Galway. "And everything kept right on growing while I was away! That's the joy of planting things. They are growing for somebody, if not for you!" Inside the house he found Firio, with the help of some of the ranchers, taking the pictures out of their cases.
"Señorita Ewold said she no could wait," Firio explained. "It was very late, she said." Jack stopped as if struck and his features became a lifeless mask, as lifeless as the walls of the canyon. He looked down at the trophy of his climb and ran his fingers over the needles slowly, again and again, in abstraction.
"When burro stumble I feel ouch and see desert and then I drift away up to sky again," answered Firio. "All right now, eh? Pretty soon you so strong I have to broil five six seven quail a day and still you hungry!" The doctor who had been looking on from the doorway felt a vigorous touch on the arm and turned to hear John Wingfield, Sr. asking him to make way.
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