“Not immediate,” said Bunny hastily. “Yesterday I run into a old friend who's been doing a bit of prospecting. He's pulled down a grubstake. Say, I'm considering a proposition he's made me. He's back yonder a spell.” And Bunny nodded indefinitely.
“Well, so long!” said Johnny.
“So long, pardner,” responded Bunny. They shook hands and separated.
Mr. Bunny passed back along the trail and was presently lost to sight behind a gray fold of the hills. Johnny found a convenient boulder and sat down to consider this meeting from every point of view.
“I reckon he lied about that grub-stake,—I reckon he's going back to Sunset!” was his definite conclusion. “Honest, he's the most ambitious liar I ever listened to!”
He quitted his boulder and went forward, but very slowly now. Memories of Sunset, memories of Mollie, were tugging at his heart-strings. All at once, breaking in upon the silence in which he moved, he heard his name called, and turning, was again gladdened by the sight of Mr. Bunny, who was coming along the trail at a brisk run.
“Say, pardner,” he panted, when he had gained a place at Johnny's side, “would you be willing to help a fellow creature in distress? Oh, not me,—a fellow named Graham; a intimate friend of mine, and a fellow in the hardest sort of luck. It'd make a wooden Indian shed tears to hear his hard-luck story; and he's met with a accident. Say, you're a western man,—I reckon you wouldn't turn your back on no fellow being in real eighteen-carat distress the way Bob Graham is!”
“What's the matter of him?” asked Johnny, with a striking lack of interest.
“One thing, he's got a hurt leg; spraint it on these here rocks and he's sufferin' something awful. But what he's sufferin' in his spraint leg ain't a circumstance to what he's sufferin' in his mind. You bet you, that's what gets a fellow every time! I know, 'cause I know what I went through with when that brunette throwed me down in Albuquerque after getting all my coin. I don't pose as no blighted being, but say, it was agony—yes, sir, agony!”
“Is this the fellow you were telling me about first? Look here, Bunny, you began pleasant enough with a grub-stake, and now I'm hearing all about a spraint leg,” said Johnny.