“They! Who?” demanded Ned.
“The settlers about here.”
“How are they going to help themselves, I’d like to know? Isn’t this a free country?”
“Yes, it’s a free country,” answered George, with a smile, “almost too free, you would think, if you had seen what I have. If you are going to live among these people, you must be one of them.”
Ned ran his eye over his cousin’s sturdy figure taking in at a glance his copper-colored face, large, rough hands and coarse clothing, and then he looked down at himself.
“How must I do it?” he asked.
“You must pull off that finery, the first thing you do,” was George’s blunt reply. “Throw it away. It is of no use to you in this country.”
“I found that out long ago,” sneered Ned. “These people look upon a red shirt as a badge of respectability.”
“And so it is, in one sense of the word,” returned George. “When you are dressed for work, you are ready for it; and when people see you at work, they know that you have an honest way of making a living. People who do nothing are of no more use here in Texas, than they are in Ohio.”
“That’s just what I have been trying to drum into his head ever since we have been here,” said Uncle John, who had not been known to do a stroke of work of any kind during the long months he had lived in the rancho. “Go on and tell him what to do, George.”