“Get on, Ike,” says he. “Hurry up!”
I gets on that horse and follers him. That’s the trouble with me; I’m a born follerer and no questions asked. We thunders through Paradise like Paul Revere advertising a flood, and I don’t overhaul Magpie until his bronc begins to miss a step here and there.
“Magpie,” says I, “let’s stop and fight.”
He yanks up his tired bronc and stares at me.
“Stop and fight?”
“Uh-huh. I’m just as big a coward as you are, Magpie, but I won’t run no further.”
“There ain’t nothing to fight, Ike.”
“You didn’t think I’d stop if I thought there was, did you? What in the devil are we killing our broncs for, I’d lower myself to ask?”
Magpie rolls a smoke and loops one long leg around the horn of his saddle. When Magpie appears to get confidential I feels that life is but a fleeting flower.
“Ike, me and you has scrabbled mighty hard for existence, ain’t we? We’ve punched cows for forty a month, prospected everywhere and found nothing much, and we run the sheriff’s office with a gun in one hand and our life in the other, ain’t we? What have we got? I asks you as man to man, what have we got?”