"We aren't stopping there this trip," said Nort.
"We're 'on our own,'" proceeded Bud. "I'm raising cattle in the old Buffalo Wallow Valley—Flume I call it now."
"Oh, yes, I did hear you were going to tackle that," spoke Babe. "Didn't know you'd got stocked up, though. Well, I've been over at Square M for so long I don't hear no real news no more. Gosh! But we did have some excitement the time those professor chaps pulled that Trombone out of the ground; didn't we, Bud?" he chuckled.
"Triceratops, Babe! Triceratops!" corrected Bud, laughing at the expression of the fat assistant foreman's face.
"I never could remember the name of them musical pieces, nohow!" sighed Babe. "Fond as I am, too, of singing," and, taking a long breath, he bellowed forth on the unoffensive morning air this portion of a ballad:
"Sing me to sleep with a spur for a rattle,
Fill up the biscuits with lead.
Coil me a rope 'round th' ole weepin' willow,
Curl my feet under my head!"
"Glad you feel that way about it," remarked Bud, rather soberly, as they squatted around the fire for breakfast, which Buck Tooth seemed to have prepared in record time.
"What's bit you?" asked Babe, pausing with a smoking flapjack half way to his mouth, while in his other hand he held a steaming tin cup of coffee. "Git out th' wrong side of th' saddle this mornin'?"
"No, but there's trouble over at the valley," explained Bud. "The water has stopped running and——"
"The water stopped running!" interrupted Babe.