“Then that McGuire goes off there and lays down with his head in the grass and bleeds. A hem’ridge they calls it. He lays there eighteen hours by the watch, and they can’t budge him. Then Ross Hargis, who loves any man who can lick him, goes to work and damns the doctors from Greenland to Poland Chiny; and him and Green Branch Johnson they gets McGuire into a tent, and spells each other feedin’ him chopped raw meat and whisky.
“But it looks like the kid ain’t got no appetite to git well, for they misses him from the tent in the night and finds him rootin’ in the grass, and likewise a drizzle fallin’. ‘G’wan,’ he says, ‘lemme go and die like I wanter. He said I was a liar and a fake and I was playin’ sick. Lemme alone.’
“Two weeks,” went on the cook, “he laid around, not noticin’ nobody, and then—”
A sudden thunder filled the air, and a score of galloping centaurs crashed through the brush into camp.
“Illustrious rattlesnakes!” exclaimed Pete, springing all ways at once; “here’s the boys come, and I’m an assassinated man if supper ain’t ready in three minutes.”
But Raidler saw only one thing. A little, brown-faced, grinning chap, springing from his saddle in the full light of the fire. McGuire was not like that, and yet—
In another instant the cattleman was holding him by the hand and shoulder.
“Son, son, how goes it?” was all he found to say.
“Close to the ground, says you,” shouted McGuire, crunching Raidler’s fingers in a grip of steel; “and dat’s where I found it—healt’ and strengt’, and tumbled to what a cheap skate I been actin’. T’anks fer kickin’ me out, old man. And—say! de joke’s on dat croaker, ain’t it? I looked t’rough the window and see him playin’ tag on dat Dago kid’s solar plexus.”
“You son of a tinker,” growled the cattleman, “whyn’t you talk up and say the doctor never examined you?”