“I guess,” he thought, with an effort to recall little girls he had seen—ah, how long ago it was that he had seen any!—“she’s most likely about twelve. She’ll be mighty pretty when she grows up.”
His foot still hurt, cruelly, in consequence of his rash experiment, but fortunately they were at the rancho. A few moments later they had reached the casa, where Morgan Anderson took charge of his guest with skilful good-will. Like all cattlemen, he was fairly expert at attending to hurts; could set a bone, on a pinch, and it did not take him long to discover that one of the small bones of Gard’s foot was dislocated. With Sandy Larch’s aid he set the matter to rights, and bandaged the foot in a way that would have done credit to professional skill.
He would not hear of his patient’s riding back to Sylvania that day.
“Not a bit of it!” he cried, when Gard proposed it. “That’s going to be one unmercifully sore foot by to-morrow; and suppose—”
He checked himself before voicing the suggestion that another accident might possibly put the foot badly out of commission. He had the plainsman’s idea that a horseman should stay with his mount; so he merely said that he wanted to keep an eye on the foot.
“You can’t be sure one of the little bones may not be broken,” he explained, “and anyway, we’re mighty glad to see folks here; so I guess we’ll have to keep you.” And Gard, more willing than at the moment he realized, accepted the invitation.
It was Manuel Gordo who, riding in from the upper range, saw the stranger’s horse, lathered and excited, wandering afield, and threw a rope over him. When he got the bronco to the Palo Verde corrals and took off the saddle, he gave a low, comprehending whistle. Under the blanket, well back, but yet where a rider’s weight would press, was a bit of cholla, the vicious fish-hook cactus of the desert, so disposed as to cause the horse exquisite pain.
Manuel swore a rolling Mexican oath as the thing caught his fingers, and stamped it into the desert before giving attention to the bronco’s back. This, later, he showed to Sandy Larch, with a vivid explanation.
“The blame cowards!” the foreman commented. “So they thought they’d git ’im that way, did they? It seemed mighty queer to me that he couldn’t sit anything four-legged he was likely to git in the ord’nary run, in Sylvania; but that pinto must ’a’ raged considerable with that on its back.”
“Who you think do-a that?” Manuel asked, and the foreman told him of the scene in the Happy Family Saloon. “Some o’ that gang’s been tryin’ to get even,” he finished, and Manuel growled assent.