"Jimmie," cried Dan, "air you dead yet?"
"Not quite," came an attenuated whisper from the other side of the passage.
"We'll live to be married, old socks," continued Dan in a robuster voice, "but I've got the worst dose o' prickly heat you ever saw."
The following day our three friends were riding the range. Six months afterwards, Professor Adam Chawner resumed his work at the Smithsonian Institute.
XII
THE BABE
One of the Britishers who came to Paradise was an Irishman, the son of an archdeacon with a large family and a small income. He was a strapping fellow, strong and sturdy as a camel--and quite as obstinate. He always spoke affectionately of his people, but I fancy they were not deeply grieved when he left England. I dare say he was troublesome at home; you know what that means. However, he was warmly welcomed in Paradise, for he brought with him two hundred pounds in cash, and a disposition to spend it as quickly as possible. Ajax christened him The Babe, because he had a milk-and-roses complexion, and a babe's capacity for, and love of, liquid refreshment. Perhaps the archdeacon thought that the West was a sort of kindergarten, where children like The Babe are given, at small expense, object-lessons and exercises peculiarly adapted to young and plastic minds. In Central America certain tribes living by the seaboard throw their children into the surf, wherein they sink or learn to swim, as the Fates decree. Some sink.
When The Babe's two hundred pounds were spent, he came to us and asked for a job. He said, I remember, that he was the son of an archdeacon, and that he could trust us to bear that in mind. We were so impressed by his guileless face and cock-a-hoop assurance, that we had not the heart to turn him away.
At the end of a fortnight Ajax took pencil and paper, and computed what The Babe had cost us. He had staked a valuable horse; he had smashed a patent reaper; he had set fire to the ranch, and burnt up five hundred acres of bunch grass; and he had turned some of our quiet domestic cows into wild beasts, because--as he put it--he wished to become a vaquero. He said that the billet of foreman would just suit his father's son.