“I’d like to see anybody make me when I put my foot down,” Andy went on to say. “The fact of the matter is, Frank, between you and me and the lamp-post, when I found out what sort of a scorcher we were in for today, I began to lose some of my own enthusiasm. Sure I’d have gone along if you were all right, and taken my medicine as well as I could; but this alkali dust don’t please me a whit; and on a red hot day it’s a lot of a nuisance to have to keep on riding in a saddle on such a slow thing as a cayuse.”
“Oh! you’re spoiled by this mile-a-minute gait of your air steed, that’s plain,” chuckled Frank, “but your uncle will be disappointed if you don’t go along, Andy.”
“He’ll have to be, then,” returned the other steadily, as though his mind was made up, and nothing could change it. “I don’t pretend to be able to keep up with Buckskin, Shorty and all that lot of hard riders. They can wear me to a frazzle in the long run. My place, where I shine, is with you in a biplane. There you don’t have to work your way, but just sit and enjoy the grandest view any fellow ever had spread out before him, while’s he spinning along at much more than a mile-a-minute speed. The air route for mine, every time.”
“Well, I see there’s no use trying to force you to go; but I’m sorry that this has happened, Andy.”
“Shucks! don’t you bother your head about me,” his cousin said, with a chuckle. “Fact is, I’m rather tickled at finding an excuse for backing down without its looking that I’m showing the white feather. That thought of three days in the saddle, with the heat and dust gave me a bad feeling. And Frank, perhaps we might look the boys and their chuck wagon up tomorrow in our biplane. That’s a heap sight more to my fancy, let me tell you, now.”
“All right, Andy. But there’s your uncle outside, looking after things. We’d better see him, and let him know, before he gets ponies ready for us.”
Both boys went outside, and when Mr. Witherspoon heard about Frank’s sickness he expressed the greatest concern. After hearing the symptoms he agreed with Andy that it must have been the extreme heat of the preceding day that had knocked his cousin out.
“Nothing serious at all,” announced the ranchman, “I’ve felt the same way myself more than a few times, after unusual heat, and hard riding. No use trying to keep in the saddle when you’ve got that dizzy spell; just lie down, and Mrs. Ogden ’ll give you a dose of the same medicine that always brings me around. Chances are you’ll be feeling all right by noon, or before night, anyway.”
“We feel sorry not to be able to go along with you on the round-up, Uncle,” remarked Andy.
“I’d put off starting until tomorrow, boys, only all preparations have been made and it would interfere with our work more or less,” the ranchman went on to say with a tinge of regret in his voice, as though he were tempted to do this at any cost.