"Better tell him that we don't mean him any harm," suggested Jack.
Pete translated the boy's remark to the hermit, who chattered rapidly in Mexican in response. While he was talking Jack eyed the queer old man.
"I believe he is crazy," he said to himself. The hermit's beady eyes had a malevolent glare in them, and when they fell on him Jack felt a creepy sort of sensation.
"I don't half like the idea of going into that old fellow's hut," he told himself, "but I guess there's no help for it."
Pete, however, it seemed, felt no such apprehensions, for he was now leading the two ponies round to a small shelter in the face of the mountain which served the old man as a stable. A disreputable-looking "clay-bank" mule, with only one ear and a half, was standing in it disconsolately flopping her whole organ of hearing.
"He don't look very good, but I guess he's all right," said Pete in a low tone, in response to Jack's whispered comment on the old hermit.
Inside the hut they found a smoky sort of stew cooking in a big iron pot. The old Mexican explained that the meat in it was deer flesh, and the vegetables, which were corn, tomatoes, and peppers, came from a small patch he cultivated behind his lonely hut. Although they had to eat with one spoon out of the great pot itself, neither of the travelers was in a critical or fastidious mood, and they made a hearty meal.
The food disposed of, Pete, to his huge delight, discovered that the old man had some home-grown tobacco, and having borrowed a black pipe from him, he fell to smoking. All this time Jack was nervous and apprehensive. Once or twice he had caught the ragged old fellow's beady eyes fixed on him, with their strange burning look. His impression that the lonely hut-dweller was insane grew upon him. But Pete seemed quite at his ease. Suddenly the cow-puncher said:
"I'm as sleepy as the Old Scratch, Jack. What do you say if we take forty winks?"
"Better be getting on, Pete; we can sleep later," warned Jack with a wink in the direction of the old man, to show he mistrusted him.