“I bought it in Palos. It is my fashion. I won’t dress as my cousin and all the other fellows about here do. They are a lot of boors!”
“All except your cousin, of course.”
“No, I don’t except even him. He goes looking like a day-laborer, and he’s rich, too. He has six thousand dollars that he made himself. More than that, when he becomes of age, he will step into a property worth forty thousand a year, and father and I will have to step out of it, and I’ll have to go behind a counter again.”
“Who gets the property if anything happens to your cousin?”
“I do.”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know, and neither does Zeke, his herdsman. He went away to his camp a few hours before the Greasers came through here, and we begin to fear that he was carried off by them, although we never heard of their taking a prisoner.”
“Well, if I were in your boots I should hope that he would never come back again.”
Ned looked down at the horn of his saddle, and made no reply in words; but his manner seemed to say, at least Gus so interpreted it, that if George had been so unfortunate as to fall into the hands of the Mexicans, and they should decide to keep him a life-long prisoner, Ned would waste no sorrow over it.