“I know that, all right,” snapped Dade, and started off with his hat tilted over his eyes.  No one, he reminded himself, would want to spend a month or so riding the range when he could stay and philander with as pretty a Spanish girl as ever played the game of cat-and-mouse with a man.  And Jack never had been the kind to go looking for trouble; truth to tell, he had never found it necessary, for trouble usually flew to meet him as a needle flies to the magnet.

But, a wound is not necessarily a deadly one because it sends excruciating pain-signals to a man’s heart and brain; and love seldom is fatal, however painful it may be.  Dade was slowly recovering, under the rather heroic treatment of watching his successor writhe and exult by turns, as the mood of the maiden might decree.  Strong medicine, that, to be swallowed with a wry face, if you will; but it is guaranteed to cure if the sufferer is not a mental and moral weakling.

Dade was quite ready to go out to rodeo work; indeed, he was anxious to go.  But, not being a morbid young man, he did not contemplate carrying a broken heart with him.  Teresita was sweet and winsome and maddeningly alluring; he knew it, he felt it still.  Indeed, he was made to realize it every time the whim seized her to punish Jack by smiling upon Dade.  But she was as capricious as beauty usually is, and he knew that also; and after being used several times as a club with which to beat Jack into proper humility (and always seeing very clearly that he was merely the club and nothing more) he had almost reached the point where he could shrug shoulders philosophically at her coquetry; and what is better, do it without bitterness.  At least, he could do it when he had not seen her for several hours, which made rodeo time a relief for which he was grateful.

What hurt him most, just now, was the constraint between him and Jack; time was when Jack would have told him immediately of any unpleasant meeting with Jose.  It never occurred to Dade that he himself had fostered the constraint by his moody aloofness when he was fighting the first jealous resentment he had ever felt against the other in the years of their constant companionship.  An unexpected slap on the shoulder almost sent him headlong.

“Say, old man, I didn’t mean it,” Jack began contritely, referring perhaps to his petulant speech, rather than to his mode of making his presence known.  “But—­come over here in the shade, and let’s have it out once for all.  I know you aren’t stuck up over being majordomo, but all the same you’re not the old Dade, whether you know it or not.  You go around as if—­well—­you know how you’ve been.  What I wanted to say is, what’s the matter?  Is it anything I’ve said or done?”

He sat down on the stone steps of a hut used for a storehouse and reached moodily for his smoking material.  “I know I didn’t say anything about running up against Jose—­but it wasn’t anything beyond a few words; and, Dade, you’ve been almighty hard to talk to lately.  If you’ve got anything against me—­”