Nan drew a deep breath. All they asked was honesty. And she wasn’t honest. But if she had been honest she would still be tramping the streets, looking for work, or working for a small wage and living in a hall bedroom, cooking hamburger over a gas jet.
“Everybody ain’t honest,” said Sleepy.
“If they was,” said Hashknife softly, “we’d settle down, pardner.”
“And sprout,” added Sleepy.
Nan didn’t know what they meant, and it was possibly just as well for her peace of mind that she did not, although they knew nothing wrong of her. To her they were but two drifting cowboys, looking for work, but the back trails that Hashknife had spoken about knew them for more than that.
Their partnership had begun when Henry Hartley, a long, gangling cowboy, fairly fresh from the Milk River country in Montana, drifted south and became a rider for the brand from which he had later been nicknamed.
And on this same ranch was Dave Stevens, nicknamed Sleepy, a cowboy with an itching foot. Together they rode the range of the Hashknife, bunking together, sharing what they had, until the horizon called them and they rode away together, for ever ordained by Fate to keep on going, always looking to see what was on the other side of the hill.
Hashknife was the son of a range preacher, who propounded the gospel of life in bunk-house or in the open; teaching men how to live rather than how to die; and Hashknife had absorbed much of his philosophy as a foundation.
But through some kink Hashknife had been born with a keenly analytical mind. He knew that every effect must have a cause. His keen eyes registered impressions of things that other men might overlook, and as Sleepy had said: “He hears the grass grow.”
It seemed as though fate threw them into troubled places. Unconsciously they would blunder into a range mystery, where Hashknife would be in his element until it was cleared up. Again they would accept an assignment from a cattle association to clear up some trouble.