"Is that so?"
"Seh, I have walked far, and am much exhausted."
Jim looked at the preacher's pants, and saw that a streak of the cloth from knee to ankle was dusty none—the same being the mark of the stirrup leathers. He could not have walked a hundred yards from his horse.
"Stranger," says Jim, "your horse is just on the other side of this hill."
"Yes, indeed—but it never lets me get any nearer, and I've chased it for miles!"
"I'll catch your horse." Jim swung to his seat, spurred off, circled the hilltop, and found the preacher's horse, rein to the ground, unable to trot without being tripped at once, dead easy to catch at one jump. This parson man was a liar, anyway.
Then something caught Jim's eye, a sort of winking star on a hill-crest far to the east. He watched that star winking steady to right and left. The thing was a heliograph making talk, as it supposed, to the preacher, and Jim watched harder than ever.
He couldn't read the signs, so wondering most plentiful, he spurred up to find out if anything more could be seen from the crest of the hill. Yes, there lay the railroad, and the town of Lordsburgh, plain as a map. This preacher had been sly, and heaps untruthful, so Jim rode back leading his horse, but kept the sights he had seen for his own consumption.
"I suah thank y'u, seh," says the preacher. "Alas! that I should be so po' a horseman. My sacred calling has given me no chances of learning to ride like you-all."
Jim watched him swing to the saddle as only a stockman can. You may dress a puncher in his last coffin, but no disguise short of that will spoil his riding.