“In the first place we chanced to be of some little assistance to you.”
“A heap!” broke in the other, quickly.
“And then, excuse me for saying it, but you are such a kid that anybody would be surprised to run across you out by yourself, carrying a gun, riding a pony like the smartest puncher going, and after big game at the time you got stuck in that quicksand—all of which, Amos, must be our excuse for feeling that we’d like to hear something about you.”
“That’s only fair and square, Ned,” the boy spoke up immediately; “Jimmy there has been telling me the greatest lot of stuff about what you fellows have been doing all over, that I’d think he was stuffing me, only he held up his hand right in the start, and declared he never told anything but the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help him. And I’m ready to tell you who I am, and what I’m adoin’ out here.”
“Not that we think you’re anything that you shouldn’t be, Amos,” put in Jack.
“Well, my name’s Amos Adams, just like I said, and all my life I’ve been around a cattle ranch. That’s why I know so much about roping steers, and riding buckin’ broncs. I guess I was in a saddle before my ma weaned me. There are a few things mebbe I can’t quite do as well as some of these here prize punchers, but it’s only because I ain’t as strong as them, that’s all.”
Looking at his confident face the scouts believed that Amos was only speaking the plain truth.
“My dad’s name is Hy Adams,” continued the kid puncher. “I guess you ain’t been around these diggin’s much yet, or you’d a heard who he is. They call him the Bad Man of the Bittersweets, and when he raises his fog-horn of a voice lots of men that think themselves brave just give a hitch to their shoulders this way,” and he imitated it to the life as he spoke, “and does what he tells ’em. That’s when he’s been drinkin’. But then there are other times—oh, well, I reckon, I hadn’t ought to tell family secrets.
“We live in a cabin, ’bout ten miles away from here. My dad, he’s in the cattle business, when he don’t loaf. Sometimes he’s ’round home, and agin he ain’t, just ’cordin’ to how things are agoin’. Mam, she’s a little woman, but she knows how to run the house. I gotter sister, too, younger’n me, and her name it’s Polly. I ain’t gone to school any to speak of, but mam, she kinder teaches me, when I ain’t ridin’ out on the range, or totin’ my gun on a hunt. That makes me mad to think I lost my gun in the drink there.”
“No use hunting for it in the morning, I should think?” suggested Jack.