"Some horse, that, Stranger." The man's voice that had sounded thinly sinister had a humanized tone as he said this.
Carney's tongue was dry, puckered from the lowered vitality. He tried to answer, and the man, noting this, said: "Take your time, Mister. You're makin' the grade all right, all right. I knowed you was just asleep. Try this dope."
He poured some hot tea into a tin cup. It toniced the tired Carney; it was like oil on the dry bearings of a delicate machine.
"Some April shower," the man said, piling wood on the fire. "I heerd a horse neigh—it was kind of a squeal, and my bronch havin' drifted out to sea ahead of this damn gale, I thinks he's come back. I heerd his bell, and I makes a fight with ol' white whiskers—'twan't more'n 'bout ten yards at that—and there's that danged rat of yours, and he won't come in to the warm 'cause you'd got pinned agin a boulder and snow; he seemed to know that if he pulled too hard he'd break your danged neck. Then we got you in—that's all. Some horse!"
This and the warmth and the tonic tea brought Carney up to date. He held out his hand.
But a curious metamorphosis in the man startled Carney. He turned surlily to shake up the fire, throwing over his shoulder: "I ain't done nothin'; you've got to thank that little jack rabbit fer pullin' you through. I went out after my own bronch."
"But ain't I all right, Stranger?" Carney asked gently, for he had met many men in the waste places with just this curious antipathy to an unknown. Oregon was like that. Men living in the wide outside became like outcast buffalo bulls, in their supersensitiveness—every man was an enemy till he proved himself.
The man straightened up, and his eyes that were set too close together each side of the fin-like nose rested on Carney in a squinting look of distrust.
"I ain't never knowed but one man was all right, and the Mounted Police hounded him till he give up."
The cave man turned the stem of the pipe he had been smoking toward the horse. "That buckskin with the mule ears belongs to Bulldog Carney. Are you him, or are you a hawse thief?"