"Que hay, Bud," grinned José. "Your ol' nose smell the booze damn' queek, no?"
He set down his bowl and went out. Farris stared wonderingly at Lee.
"Bud, is it?" he grunted. "Breaker of horses; hired man at a dollar a day——?"
"Ninety dollars a month, Dick," Lee corrected g him, with a short laugh. "Give a fellow his true worth, old-timer."
Farris frowned.
"What devil's game is this!" he demanded sharply. "Isn't it enough that you should drop out of the world with never a word, but that you must show up now breaking horses and letting such chaps as Mrs. Simpson's Black Spanish chum with you? Not a cursed word in five years, and I've lain awake nights wondering. When you went to smash——"
"When a Lee goes to smash," said Bud briefly, "he goes to smash. That's all there is to it."
"But there was no sense, no use in your dropping out of sight that way——"
"There was," said Lee curtly, "or I shouldn't have done it. It wasn't just that I went broke; that was a result of my own incompetence in a bit of speculation and didn't worry me a great deal. But other things did. There were a couple of the fellows that I thought were friends of mine. I found out that they had knifed me; had helped pluck me to feather their own nests. It hurt, Dick; hurt like hell. Losing the big ranch in the South was a jolt, I'll admit; seeing those fellows take it over and split it two ways between them, sort of knocked the props out from under me. I believed in them, you see. After that I just wanted to get away and sort of think things over."
"You went to Europe?"