“Help yourself,” said the boy.  “What time d’you want me to wake you up?”

“Never mind; I wake up automatic.  S’long, Bud.”

He stretched out on the blankets and was instantly asleep.

CHAPTER XIII

A TOUCH OF CRIMSON

At the end of three hours he awoke as sharply as though an alarm were clamouring at his ear.  There was no elaborate preparation for renewed activities.  A single yawn and stretch and he was again on his feet.  Since the boy was not in sight he cooked himself an enormous meal, devoured it, and went out to the mustang.

The roan greeted him with a volley from both heels that narrowly missed the head of Nash, but the cowpuncher merely smiled tolerantly.

“Feelin’ fit agin, eh, damn your soul?” he said genially, and picking up a bit of board, fallen from the side of the shed, he smote the mustang mightily along the ribs.  The mustang, as if it recognized the touch of the master, pricked up one ear and side-stepped.  The brief rest had filled it with all the old, vicious energy.

For once more, as soon as they rode clear of the door, there ensued a furious struggle between man and beast.  The man won, as always, and the roan, dropping both ears flat against its neck, trotted sullenly out across the hills.

In that monotony of landscape, one mile exactly like the other, no landmarks to guide him, no trail to follow, however faintly worn, it was strange to see the cowpuncher strike out through the vast distances of the mountain-desert with as much confidence as if he were travelling on a paved street in a city.  He had not even a compass to direct him but he seemed to know his way as surely as the birds know the untracked paths of the air in the seasons of migration.

Straight on through the afternoon and during the long evening he kept his course at the same unvarying dog-trot until the flush of the sunset faded to a stern grey and the purple hills in the distance turned blue with shadows.  Then, catching the glimmer of a light on a hillside, he turned toward it to put up for the night.

In answer to his call a big man with a lantern came to the door and raised his light until it shone on a red, bald head and a portly figure.  His welcome was neither hearty nor cold; hospitality is expected in the mountain-desert.  So Nash put up his horse in the shed and came back to the house.

The meal was half over, but two girls immediately set a plate heaped with fried potatoes and bacon and flanked by a mighty cup of jetblack coffee on one side and a pile of yellow biscuits on the other.  He nodded to them, grunted by way of expressing thanks, and sat down to eat.

Beside the tall father and the rosy-faced mother, the family consisted of the two girls, one of them with her hair twisted severely close to her head, wearing a man’s blue cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up to a pair of brown elbows.  Evidently she was the boy of the family and to her fell the duty of performing the innumerable chores of the ranch, for her hands were thick with work and the tips of the fingers blunted.  Also she had that calm, self-satisfied eye which belongs to the workingman who knows that he has earned his meal.