A comfortable-looking matron, feeding her chickens, looked up to see the horse and its load motionless before her.
“Lands sake!” she ejaculated, amazed; then raised her voice in a shout to her husband. “Father, come here. Buckskin has come home, and——”
She broke off to run to McClintock’s aid. He had slid from the saddle to the ground.
“The poor boy,” she cried. “He’s all shot up. He’s dead, I guess. It’s them Piutes. Help me get him into the house, Father.”
With a ghost of a smile the wounded boy reassured her.
CHAPTER IV
SCOT McCLINTOCK INTRODUCES HIMSELF
Mark Twain tells us that in the early Nevada days it gave a man no permanent satisfaction to shoot an enemy through both lungs, because the dry air was so exhilarating that the wounded foe was soon as good as new. Hugh McClintock was an illustration of this. He reached the Mormon settlement a white-faced rag of humanity. But he had lived hard and clean. The wind and the sun and able-bodied forbears had given him a constitution tough as hammered brass. When his brother Scot drove from Virginia City to see him, having heard the news that Hugh was wounded to death, he found the boy wrapped in a blanket and sitting in the sunshine at the corner of the ranch house. This was just a week after the end of the young brother’s wild ride.
“ ’Lo, Hugh! How are cases?” asked Scot, his gay smile beaming down at the boy.
“Fine as silk, Scot. I got an appetite like a bear. Sorry you had to come so far.”