“Don’t forget Wrath of God—­and Jag Ear is thirsty—­and bury Wrath of God fittingly—­give him an epitaph!  He was gloomy, but it was a good gloom, a kind of kingly gloom, and he liked the prospect when at last he stuck his head through the blue blanket of the horizon.”

Those of the party who remained behind for the last duty to the dead counted its most solemn moment, perhaps, the one that gave Wrath of God the honorable due of a soldier who had fallen face to the enemy.  Bob Worther wrote the epitaph with a pencil on a bit of wood:  “Here lies the gloomiest pony that ever was.  The gloomier he was the better he went and the better Jack Wingfield liked him;” which was Bob’s way of interpreting Jack’s instructions.

Then Worther and his detail rode as fast as they might to overtake the slow-marching group in trail of the litters with the question that all Little Rivers had been asking ever since, “How is he?” A ghastly, painfully tedious journey this homeward one, made mostly in the night, with the men going thirsty in the final stretches in order that wet bandages might be kept on Jack’s feverish head; while Dr. Patterson was frequently thrusting his little thermometer between Jack’s hot, cracking lips.

“If he were free of this jouncing!  It is a terrible strain on him, but the only thing is to go on!” the doctor kept repeating.

But when Jack lay white and still in his bedroom and Firio was rapidly convalescing, the fever refused to abate.  It seemed bound to burn out the life that remained after the hemorrhage from his wounds had ceased.  Men found it hard to work in the fields while they waited on the crisis.  John Wingfield, Sr. sat for hours under Dr. Patterson’s umbrella-tree in moody absorption.  He talked to all who would talk to him.  Always he was asking about the duel in the arroyo which was fought in Jack’s way.  He could not hear enough of it; and later he almost attached himself to the one eye-witness of the final duel, which had been fought in Leddy’s way.

When Firio was well enough to walk out he was to be found in a long chair on Jack’s porch, ever raising a warning finger for silence to anyone who approached and looking out across the yard to Jag Ear, who was winning back the fat he had lost in a constitutional crisis, and P.D., who, after bearing himself first and last in a manner characteristic of a pony who was P.D. but never Q., seemed already none the worse for the hardships he had endured.  The master of twenty millions would sit on the steps, while Firio occupied the chair and regarded him much as if he were a blank wall.  But at times Firio would humor the persistent inquirer with a few abbreviated sentences.  It was out of such fragments as this that John Wingfield, Sr. had to piece the story of the fight for the water-hole.

“Senor Jack and Mister Prather, they no look alike,” said Firio one day, evidently bound to make an end of the father’s company.  “Anybody say that got bad eyes.  Mister Prather”—­and Firio smiled peculiarly—­“I call him the mole!  He burrow in the sand, so!  His hand tremble, so!  He act like a man believe himself the only god in the world when he in no danger, but when he get in danger he act like he afraid he got to meet some other god!”