"Isn't she liable to start off home without ceremony?" asked Jack as he observed this.
"Not she," rejoined Pete wisely; "she's too tired to move a step."
All of which goes to show, as we shall see later, that it takes a wise cow-puncher to know a mule.
It was about midnight that Jack was awakened by a most unearthly yell. He sprang to his feet, with every nerve in his body tingling, and the first thing he observed was that Pete was missing. The cause of absence was not long in doubt. A sudden fit of homesickness had seized the old one-eared mule in the night, and she had started without delay for the hermit's hut, dragging with her the luckless Pete. The cow-puncher's yells filled the cañon.
Small wonder was it that he cried out in anguish, for the side of the hill down which the old mule was loping was as steep as the side of a house, and plentifully bestrewn with rocks, inter-grown with rough scraggly brush. Jack was fully dressed, just as he had lain down, and he leaped off into the darkness in the direction in which Pete's hideous yells and the clattering of the old mule's hoofs proclaimed them to be. But before he reached them, the abrupt descent of the mountain by Pete had ceased. The old mule had been halted in midcareer by the rope becoming entangled in a small, low-growing piñon, and she had been checked as effectively as if a hand had been laid on the rope.
"Here, for goodness sake, get me cut loose from this she fiend incarnate," begged Pete, as he heard Jack coming toward him.
"Well, do make less noise, then," said Jack, who could hardly keep from laughing at Pete's doleful tones.
"Noise," groaned Pete, "it's a wonder I'm not making the all-sorrowfulest caterwauling you ever heard. If there's a sound bit of skin on my poor carcass, I'll give you a five-dollar gold piece for it, and no restrictions as to size, either. Ouch!"
He gave a painful exclamation as he rose to his feet.