"You mean you think he's jest nach'ly got guts--an' him a pilgrim?"
"How the hell do I know what he's got?" snapped the other. "Can't you
wait till we get to Buffalo?"
Curly allowed his horse to fall back a few paces. "First time I ever
know'd Tex to pack a grouch," he mused, as his lips drew into a grin.
"He's sore 'cause the pilgrim hain't a-snifflin' an' a-carryin'-on an'
tryin' to beg off. Gosh! If he turns out to be a reg'lar hand, an'
steps up an' takes his medicine like a man, the joke'll be on Tex. The
boys never will quit joshin' him--an' he knows it. No wonder he's
sore."
The cowboys rode straight across the bench. Song and conversation had
ceased and the only sounds were the low clink of bit chains and the
soft rustle of horses' feet in the buffalo grass. At the end of an
hour the leaders swung into an old grass-grown trail that led by
devious windings into a deep, steep-sided coulee along the bottom of
which ran the bed of a dried-up creek. Water from recent rains stood
in brackish pools. Remnants of fence with rotted posts sagging from
rusty wire paralleled their course. A dilapidated cross-fence barred
their way, and without dismounting, a cowboy loosened the wire gate and
threw it aside.
A deserted log-house, windowless, with one corner rotted away, and the
sod roof long since tumbled in, stood upon a treeless bend of the dry
creek.
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