“Oh.”  Dade slackened his pace a bit.  “Why didn’t you say so?”

“I think,” retorted Jack, grinning a little, “somebody else’s nerves are kinda frazzled, too.  I don’t want you to begin worrying over my affairs, Dade.  I’m not,” he asserted with unconvincing emphasis.  “But all the same, I’d like to get my fingers on the fellow that took my riata!”

Since he formulated that wish after he reached the doorway of the roomy box-stall where Surry was housed, he faced a badly scared peon as the door swung open.

“Senor—­I—­pardon, Senor!  But I feared that harm might come to the riata in the night.  There are many guests, Senor, who speak ill of gringos, and I heard a whisper—­”

Jack, gripping Diego by the shoulders, halted his nervous explanations.  “What about the riata?” he cried.  “Do you know where it is?”

“Si, Senor.  Me, I took it from the senor’s saddle, for I feared harm would be done if it were left there to tempt those who would laugh to see the senor dragged to the death to-day.  Senor, that is Jose’s purpose; from a San Vincente vaquero I heard—­and he had it from the lips of Manuel.  Jose will lasso the senor, and the horse will run away with Jose, and the senor will be killed.  Ah, Senor!—­Jose’s skill is great; and Manuel swears that now he will truly fight like a demon, because the prayers of the senorita go with Jose.  Her glove she sent him for a token—­Manuel swears that it is so, and a message that he is to kill thee, Senor!”

“But my riata?” To Diego’s amazement, his blue-eyed god seemed not in the least disturbed, either by plot or gossip.

“Ah, the riata!  Last night I greased it well, Senor, so that to-day it would be soft.  And this morning at daybreak I stretched it here in the stall and rubbed it until it shone.  Now it is here, Senor, where no knife-point can steal into it and cunningly cut the strands that are hidden, so that the senor would not observe and would place faith upon it and be betrayed.”  Diego lifted his loose, linen shirt and disclosed the riata coiled about his middle.

The eyes of his god, when they rested upon the brown body wrapped round and round with the rawhide on which his life would later hang, were softer than they had been since he had craved the kiss that had been denied him, many hours before.  It was only the blind worship and the loyalty of a peon whose feet were bare, whose hands were calloused with labor, whose face was seamed with the harshness of his serfdom.  Only a peon’s loyalty; but something hard and bitter and reckless, something that might have proved a more serious handicap than a strange riata, dropped away from Jack’s mood and left him very nearly his normal self.  It was as if the warmth of the rawhide struck through the chill which Teresita’s unreasoning spite had brought to the heart of him, and left there a little glow.

“Gracias, Diego,” he said, and smiled in the way that made one love him.  “Let it stay until I have need of it.  It will surely fly true, to-day, since it has been warmed thus by thy friendship.”