“You bate! I say it must be rippin’ fun to be a real cowboy and jest ride ’round on a horse and do nothing but tend cattle that don’t have to be milked and cleaned and fed in a tieup and fussed over, the way farmer’s critters are. I’ve read about cowboy life, and it sartainly is the kind for me.”
The Texan laughed outright. “Not if you are adverse to hard work,” he asserted. “Likely the stories you’ve read about cowboy life have given you the impression that it consists principally of adventure and romance and very little work. But let me tell you straight, partner, there’s no harder work a fellow can do, and there’s mighty little romance connected with it.”
But Simpson shook his head incredulously. “Can’t be so,” he doubted. “Sometime mebbe I’ll go West and be a cowboy.”
“If you carry out that design,” returned Grant, still smiling, “you’ll soon come to realize the fact that, in the way of work, Eastern farm life is almost play compared with cow-punching. One experience upon the range in a Texas norther would knock all the romance out of your noddle, to say nothing of the lesson you’d get during a good dry, blistering summer, when you’d have to be on the hike day after day from an hour or more before the first peep of dawn until long after nightfall.”
Still Jim Simpson was not convinced, for, like many a mistaken Eastern youth, he had come to regard the life of a cowboy as a most enviable existence, and nothing but a test of its hardships could convince him otherwise.
“Why, right now,” he said, rising, stretching and yawning, “I’ve got to hustle back to the farm and putter around till it’s dark and time for supper. S’pose I’d better be goin’.”
But ere he departed Sleuth mysteriously drew him aside and talked with him for some time in low tones that carried no distinguishable word to the rest of the campers. Naturally, Piper’s friends speculated over this, and when Simpson was gone they sought in vain to quiz Sleuth. He rebuffed them flatly.
“It’s told that curiosity once killed a cat,” he said, “and I can aver that it got a certain party badly stung by ‘gougers.’ When I’m ready to make known my private business, I’ll do so without being coaxed or badgered.”
CHAPTER XXIII.
CRANE RELENTS.