“Si, señor. Yo penso.”
“And I know why! I know why!” Mart sang boyishly, wrinkling his snubbed and peeling nose at his sister.
“Oh, you do! Well, let me tell you something, old kid—he’s on a wild-goose chase. This Hunter Mangan seems to be a pretty square sort of a fellow. But that ends it so far as I’m concerned. Between you and me, podhead, I don’t dislike Mr. Mangan nearly so much as I pretended I do to Pa Squawtooth. That is, personally, you understand. But I do detest what he represents—the railroad through Squawtooth. I don’t want it there; and if I had my way it would never be there. Pa Squawtooth, old money snob that he is, thinks it the finest thing on earth, of course. It’s a wonder he didn’t try to have it through the front yard, with a depot before the door! It’ll ruin my desert—that’s what it’ll do! Soon folks will be moving in and taking up land, and—oh, dear!—it makes me sick to think of it!”
“Aw, what d’you care? We’ll have lots fun when the camps get here.”
“You will, maybe, but I won’t. And furthermore, Mr. Wiseman Pod, you don’t know whether even you will have fun, as you so youthfully express it. What do you know about camps like that? You know nothing of the world that you haven’t seen between a cow’s horns, muchacho. Maybe you’ll have fun, and maybe you won’t.”
Mart grasped his saddle horn and leaned toward the ground, hooking the counter of one of his high-heeled cowboy boots about the cantle. Mart had been still entirely too long. With ease he grasped a bunch of the plant called squawtooth, which gave the district its name, and five spears of which, shaped like the ribs of a fan, was the Squawtooth brand. Mart held on for dear life while his pony polled. The slender, fluted, rushlike spears were tough and held tenaciously; and next instant Mart was unhorsed and standing on his head in the sand.
His sister shouted with derisive laughter. “You’re a goose!” she cried. “Watch me!”
Leaning low in the saddle, she set her mare at a gallop toward a bunch of squawtooth that upreared itself from a bed of fine desert sand. As the pinto neared it Manzanita swung toward the earth, hooked a heel about her cantle, and grasped the plant as the mare sped by.
This was an old game of the two. The squawtooth was tenacious; sometimes they were able to snap it off, sometimes otherwise. If not, and they refused to loose their hold——
Well, in this instance, too, there was a flutter of leather chaps, a girl spinning head down in air, and a smothered plup in the sand bed.