“I reckon I better go and wake up my pardner. I see the chuck-wagon is toddling along behind us.”
Bucky drew aside the curtains and shook the boy gently by the shoulder. Frank’s eyes opened and looked at the ranger with that lack of comprehension peculiar to one roused suddenly from deep sleep.
“Time to get up, Curly. The nigger just gave the first call for the chuck-wagon.”
An understanding of the situation flamed over the boy’s face. He snatched the curtains from the Arizonian and gathered them tightly together. “I’ll thank you not to be so familiar,” he said shortly from behind the closed curtains.
“I beg your pahdon, your royal highness. I should have had myself announced and craved an audience, I reckon,” was Bucky’s ironic retort; and swiftly on the heels of it he added. “You make me tired, kid.”
O’Connor was destined to be “made tired” a good many times in the course of the next few days. In all the little personal intimacies Frank possessed a delicate fastidiousness outside the experience of the ranger. He was a scrupulously clean man himself, and rather nice as to his personal habits, but it did not throw him into a flame of embarrassment to brush his teeth before his fellow passengers. Nor did it send him into a fit if a friend happened to drop into his room while he was finishing his dressing. Bucky agreed with himself that this excess of shyness was foolishness, and that to indulge the boy was merely to lay up future trouble for him. A dozen times he was on the point of speaking his mind on the subject, but some unusual quality of innocence in the lad tied his tongue.
“Blame it all, I’m getting to be a regular old granny. What Master Frank needs is a first-class dressing-down, and here the little cuss has got me bluffed to a fare-you-well so that I’m mum as a hooter on the nest,” he admitted to himself ruefully. “Just when something comes up that needs a good round damn I catch that big brown Sunday school eye of his, and it’s Bucky back to Webster’s unabridged. I’ve got to quit trailing with him, or I’ll be joining the church first thing I know. He makes me feel like I want to be good, confound the little swindle.”
Notwithstanding the ranger’s occasional moments of exasperation, the two got along swimmingly. Each of them found a continued pleasure in delving into the other’s unexplored mental recesses. They drifted into one of those quick, spontaneous likings that are rare between man and man. Some subtle quality of affection bubbled up like a spring in the hearts of each for the other. Young Hardman could perhaps have explained what lay at the roots of it, but O’Connor admitted that he was “buffaloed” when he attempted an analysis of his unusual feeling.
From El Paso a leisurely run on the Mexican Central Pacific took them to Chihuahua, a quaint old city something about the size of El Paso. Both Bucky and his friend were familiar with the manners of the country, so that they felt at home among the narrow adobe streets, the lounging, good-natured peons, and the imitation Moorish architecture. They found rooms at a quiet, inconspicuous hotel, and began making their plans for an immediate departure in the event that they succeeded in their object.
At a distance it had seemed an easy thing to plan the escape of David Henderson and to accomplish it by craft, but a sight of the heavy stone walls that encircled the prison and of the numerous armed guards who paced to and fro on the walls, put a more chilling aspect on their chances.