After the boys had gotten the cow puncher in bed, Frank took a look at the way Mr. Witherspoon had bound up the broken leg.
“Why, your uncle must be a regular surgeon, Andy!” he declared, “that’s as neat a job as I ever saw; and done while on the gallop, too, you might say. I take off my hat to Uncle Jethro, let me tell you right now.”
“We all do that, Frank,” said Joe, emphatically. “He’s the most wonderful man in the whole country. There ain’t a puncher that ever worked for him as wouldn’t go through fire and flood for Mr. Witherspoon; well, I take that back, ’cause I reckon they has been one or two as he had to fire, and for mighty good reasons, that’d like to see him lose all his stock through a norther, or else that Mexican cattle rustler.”
Inside half an hour the injured man had been made as comfortable as possible; he himself said it was the greatest snap that had ever befallen him, and that he hadn’t lain between soft white sheets since he was a kid at home in the East. Frank thought that old memories were being stirred in Joe’s mind; perhaps, after all, his accident might work for his good, in that it would cause him to recollect that there was an old mother or father somewhere east of the Mississippi, whom he had almost forgotten, and who would be wild with joy if only a letter came from the boy who had gone away from home so many years ago, and in the excitement of his life in the Southwest shut out all thoughts of the past from his heart.
Frank and Andy after having lunch sat outside where the shadows were thickest at this sweltering time of day. There could always be found a gentle puff of air at this favorite place; and lounging in a hammock, while Andy worked at some of his prints, Frank watched a lone white cloud that was drifting across the azure sky above.
Perhaps his thoughts too were turning back to other scenes as he lay there. It might be that the sight of that single fleecy fog-like vapor caused him to remember events that were connected with other scenes in the lively experiences which had come to the Bird boys while harnessing their chariot to the clouds.
“What you thinking about, Frank?” Andy asked, suddenly, after he had been watching the face of his cousin for a full minute without the other knowing it.
“Why, I was trying to picture rough Alkali Joe in the past,” replied Frank. “What he said about not having slept between sheets since he was a kid, made me think. Did you see that picture that fell out of his pocket when we took off his Mexican jacket, the one he won at the raffle they told us about?”
“Sure I did; but that wasn’t Joe’s best girl, Frank; when I picked it up and put it back I saw that it was the face of an elderly woman.”
“All the same it ought to be Joe’s best girl; because I reckon it’s his mother. And I remember him saying one day that he didn’t know whether there was anybody alive in his family or not, because he hadn’t written a letter home for six whole years. And Andy, I was just thinking, that while he’s on his back there, it might be a good time to get talking to Joe, and see if he wouldn’t think to write. If his mother’s alive still, I reckon she’d be happy to hear from him again.”