Both was quick to spot him again this time, and right then, for some reason or other the conversation died down. The first sight of that old pony hadn't been forgot, and when he showed up this second time, right before their eyes, he was like reminding 'em, and natural like, set the two men to thinking. That old shadow of a horse told some of the hard knocks of life, of things that was past and gone and which could of been bettered while the bettering could be done.
It was while the thinking was going on that way, that Clint sort of felt a faint, far away something a knocking and from down the bottom of his think tank. That something was trying hard to come back to life as that man's eyes kept a going over the pony's blazed face and bony frame, but it was buried so far underneath so many things that'd been stacked there, that the knocking was pretty well muffled up. It'd have to be helped by some sort of a sudden jolt before it could come out on top.
The jolt came as the vegetable man got his seat on the wagon and as usual reached for the whip. Clint's friend a trying to keep him from running out and starting a rompus had tried to draw his interest by asking:
"What's become of that cowhorse Smoky, that used to——?"
But the question was left for him to wonder about, for Clint wasn't there to answer, instead the hotel door slammed and only a glimpse of that same cowboy could be seen as he passed by the lobby window. In less than it takes to tell it, he was up on the wagon, took a bulldogging holt of the surprised vegetable man, and by his whiskers, drug him off his seat and down to earth.
The telephone on the desk of the sheriff's office rang till it near danced a jig, and when that feller lifted the receiver, a female voice was heard to holler: "somebody is killing somebody else with a whip, by the Casa Granda Hotel. Hurry! Quick!"
The sheriff appeared on the scene and took in the goings on at a glance. Like a man who knowed his business, his eyes went to looking for what might of caused the argument as he came. He looked at the old horse whose frame showed thru the hide, then the whip marks on that hide. He knowed horses as well as he did men, and when he noticed more marks of the same whip on the bewhiskered man's face, he stood his ground, watched, and then grinned.
"Say, cowboy," he finally says, "don't skatter that hombre's remains too much, you know we got to keep record of that kind the same as if it was a white man, and I don't want to be looking all over the streets to find out who he was."
Clint turned at the sound of the voice, and sizing up the grinning sheriff, went back to his victim and broke the butt end of the whip over his head, after which he wiped his hands, and proceeded to unhook the old horse off the wagon.
That evening was spent in "investigating." Clint and the sheriff went to the chicken-horse man and found out enough from him about the vegetable man and his way of treating horses to put that hombre in a cool place and keep him there for a spell.