Your old pardner,
Tracey Jacox.
“Reckless feller!” muttered Hank, and shook his head. “I always told him he’d shoot up the wrong man some time.”
He put the letter carefully back into his pocket, and they went to the house together.
That evening it was known at headquarters, and by the next morning it had flown all over the Sorrows that the boss was going to take an outfit down the trail to Sandoval County and bring home the herd.
“We’ll have to have, at the very least, twelve riders and a horse wrangler,” he said. “I’ll be cook and foreman both—that’s fourteen men in all. Four of us ll go from here, and I’ll hire ten men in Sandoval. It’ll take a hundred and twenty-five horses to handle that trail herd—and I’ve got ’em! Ain’t I glad now I kept all the ponies! It sure took nerve to do it. I’ll not have to buy a horse—not one. I feel like patting myself on the head for my smartness. Pettie, I’ll give you that job of patting. You might start on it right away.”
“How long will you be gone, Uncle Hank?” Hilda asked, in a voice whose utterance seemed somehow to displace very little ordinary atmosphere.
“Well, it won’t take more’n four or five days to get there—flying light. Then there’s the counting, road-branding, signing up contracts, hiring the new hands and getting supplies—I reckon it’ll take nearly two weeks to make the trip home with the herd. Say, jest about three weeks in all, Pettie.”
“Oh—three weeks!” whispered Hilda, and he looked at her curiously, but said nothing more.
Such an outburst of vitality the ranch had not known for years. There was an inspiring rush of preparation, a great looking to stirrup leathers, re-cinching of saddles, mending and overhauling of equipment, and almost more skylarking and horse-play. Out at the corrals, Shorty and two other boys who were to make the trip, stole up behind one another and knocked each other sprawling by way of a delicate intimation that the situation was humorous. They scuffled and rolled over and over like bear cubs, hammering one another joyously. All day, while working furiously, they turned again and again from their occupation to fight at the trembling of an eyelash. Shorty came wheezing out of one of these encounters with a black eye and bleeding knuckles, the shirt on his back torn to strips. But his only complaint was: