"Why, no, Ma'am; th' Doc is seein' th' error of his sinful ways, an' I reckons he'll do purty near anythin' I tell him to if I tell him right. An' of course, I wouldn't tell him no other way."
"You are a puzzle to me," confessed Margaret, smiling. "I'm never quite sure about you."
"Puzzle?" He turned his hat over and looked into it as if to find something puzzling. "Why, Ma'am," he said, grinning, daring another deep look into her eyes, "I'm as simple an' easy to read as a—as a—Injun. Now if it was you I'd say there was a puzzle—but, pshaw! I never was no good, at all, figgerin' puzzles. I remember once I was watchin' some tenderfeet playin' billiards, when I was in Kansas City, after leavin' some cattle at th' yards across th' river. They did things to them balls that I never thought could be done, an' they did them easylike. Billiards is mebby an easy game, Ma'am, for them that knows how. It looked plumb easy to me, an' awful temptin'. I got me a table over in a corner an' took off my coat. I ain't never tried it since. Th' proprietor come a-runnin' an tells me that th' blacksmith-shop is down th' street a couple of blocks. That's me, Ma'am—my touch ain't gentle—I can't help smashin'. An' when somebody gives me a puzzle to figger out I allus look to see if I can smash through it. But puzzles ain't made that way I reckon."
Margaret stepped back into the kitchen, half closed the door and said, quickly, quietly, although somewhat breathlessly: "There is no puzzle worth the solving that the right man can't solve—if he tries hard enough."
Johnny started forward, but the door closed in his face and he heard the bar drop, and then the front door slammed. He tensed himself and then relaxed, a smile lighting up his face like a sunrise bathing a granite mountain. "This weather is bound to change," he said, loudly. "I can feel cyclones in th' air—an' I ain't th' only one that had better look to their tent pegs!" He reached Pepper in two leaps, the second of which put him in the saddle, and he dashed off to find Cimarron as though it were a matter of life or death.
The segundo looked up, a covetous expression on his face. The black whirlwind slid to a stop at his feet, a cloud of dust enveloping him and drifting slowly south with the wind.
"I'm solvin' puzzles with an axe," came the astonishing statement from the heart of the cloud. "I mean, have you got a match?"
The round-up boss put his fingers in a vest pocket and produced the desired article. "I got one; but mebby you ought to roll somethin' to smoke before you lights it."
Johnny scratched his head and burst into a roar of laughter, Cimarron joining him purely because it was infectious.
"Seein' where you come from, I'd say you was loco," chuckled Cimarron. "What's on yore mind besides matches an' axes?"