CHAPTER III
"THE USE OF A SHEATH-KNIFE"
Contrary to the astronomical prophet's forecast, the Higgins was lucky in carrying the northerly breeze until she picked up the "trades," and the third day out all hands were turned to shifting sail.
By this time Broncho was beginning to feel his feet. He was fortunate in having such a useful friend as Jack Derringer, who showed him the right way to set about his work and saved him from many a trouble.
It is to be doubted if Broncho's untamed cowboy spirit would have put up with Barker's bullying and insulting tongue if it had not been for Jack's strong influence and keen common-sense way of viewing and explaining everything.
The rolling-stone, except for strange spells of melancholy, when he seemed to be lost in gloomy thoughts and was hard to get a word out of, had a way of looking at everything from a comic point of view, and his infectious smile and cool comments time and again turned Broncho's smouldering wrath into mirth.
The cowboy prided himself on his philosophical way of taking fate. His strong points were his virile manhood, his fortitude against misfortune, and his daredevil bravery, and in these traits he found an equal, if not a superior, in the cool, self-possessed Britisher.
Only once was the cowpuncher ever heard to discuss his friend, and that was in one of his queer outbursts of thought.
"This world is shore like a poker game. Some parties is mean an' no account, like an ace high or pair of deuces; some's middlin', an' has their good an' bad p'ints, like a pair o' bullets or two low pair in a Jack-pot; some gents outhold the rest as a general play, like three of a kind; but is likewise downed themselves by sech superior persons who, like flushes an' full houses, is bang full o' sand, sense, an' 'nitiative; but thar's only one sport I ever rounds up against who's got all the vartues of a four of a kind, an' that man's Derringer Jack—he's shore four aces an' the joker."