“I declare, Ned, you’re a nobby-looking fellow!” exclaimed Gus, running his eye over his friend’s neat suit of “working clothes,” and glancing from the stylish, high-stepping horse he rode to his own shaggy, ill-conditioned mustang, “and you ride as though you had lived in the saddle all your life. I see you have a rifle, too! Is that the one you killed the grizzly bears with? There goes Mose over the swell, out of sight; hadn’t we better ride on? By the way, what has become of the Indians? You must have had fearful times here since you wrote!”
“There are no Indians at all about here,” was Ned’s reassuring reply. “They have bothered the settlers in the next county above a good deal, but we have seen nothing of them. It’s the Mexicans who troubled us.”
“Did you have a fight with them?”
“I should say so!” exclaimed Ned. “I’ve got so now that I don’t care——”
Ned suddenly paused and looked at Gus. He had been on the point of declaring that he did not care any more for a fight with raiders than he did for a game of snow-ball; but after a little reflection he decided that he wouldn’t say it. It would do very well to put into a letter, if he were going to write to Gus, but since the latter was there on the ground, and in a situation to learn all he wanted to know by making inquiries of others, Ned thought he had better, for once in his life, tell the truth.
“You have got so you don’t care for what?” asked Gus, when his friend paused.
“I don’t care to see them any more,” replied Ned. “We had a fearful time on the night they jumped down on us. They didn’t find any stock about the rancho to drive off, and so they shot into the house and tried to cut the doors down with axes.”
“Gracious!” exclaimed Gus. “Were you in the house at the time?”
“No, I wasn’t, and that’s just what frightened me. They treed me in a shed, and I don’t know what they would have done to me, if they had discovered me. But I’ll tell you about that by-and-by. It is my turn to ask questions now. Did you let your father know that you were coming down here?”
“No, I didn’t. I didn’t let anybody know it, but Sam Holmes found it out, as I told you in my last letter, and would have made me a great deal of trouble, if I hadn’t been too sharp for him. Where can I get a rig like yours, Ned? Is it the fashion?”