“I wonder, Buck, if you’d be doin’ this fer me if you knowed.”
“Knowed what, Cotton Eye?”
“That money I won off you. That deck was marked.”
“Shore thing,” nodded Buck Bell, “I knowed that. But a man’s gotta have some kinda excitement around a cow camp, even if it’s playin’ poker with a marked deck. I was ketchin’ on to the markin’s about the time I went broke.”
Cotton Eye was delirious by morning. Buck was forced to tie the man down while he fed and watered the cattle. Because there was only one bed, Buck had made out with the saddle blankets and the sick man’s overcoat.
During the days that followed Buck Bell did the work of five men. He chopped wood, cooked, and nursed Cotton Eye, whose fever went down slowly. He rode out each day, gathering poor cows that were too weak to rustle. He hooked up the work team and hauled hay, scattering it in a wide circle outside the corral. He opened the water hole twice a day. He puttered about the cabin, fixing it for the long winter, and forced a cheerfulness into the chatter that he flung at Cotton Eye. When he finally crawled into his improvised bed, fully clothed save for hat and boots, he was too weary to mind the cold much.
He killed a beef one evening. That night he brought in a square piece of the hide and worked on it with his pocket knife.
“Let’s have that good leg o’ your’n, pardner.” Buck wrapped the hide about the leg, nodded, marked it with his knife and took the hide back to his seat by the fire.
“Them splints kin come off in a day er so. I’m fixin’ a sorter casin’ to fit around that game laig. This hide’ll be plenty hard and we’ll lace it, savvy? Padded with the felt from a man’s hat, she’ll make a cast that’ll be useful and right ornamental, with the hair on the outside. I’m stretchin’ it around this willer pole to make ’er smooth.”