“The little bow-legged feller, I mean.”

“Yes, I remember him very well.”

Once more the flames sputtered and he saw how she looked wistfully before her and above.  She had never seemed so lovely to Buck Daniels.  She was pale, indeed, but there was no ugly pinching of her face, and if there were shadows beneath her eyes, they only served to make her eyes seem marvelously large and bright.  She was pallid, and the firelight stained her skin with touches of tropic gold, and cast a halo of the golden hair about her face.  She seemed like one of those statues wrought in the glory and the rich days of Athens in ivory and in gold—­some goddess who has heard the tidings of the coming fall, the change of the old order, and sits passive in her throne waiting the doom from which there is no escape.  Something of this filtered through to the sad heart of Buck Daniels.  He, too, had no hope—­nay, he had not even her small hope, but somehow he was able to pity her and cherish the picture of her in that gloomy place.  It seemed to Buck Daniels that he would give ten years from the best of his life to see her smile as he had once seen her in those old, bright days.  He went on with his tale.

“You would have busted laughin’ if you’d seen him at the Circle Y Bar roundup the way I seen him.  Shorty ain’t so bad with a rope.  He’s always talkin’ about what he can do and how he can daub a rope on anything that’s got horns.  He ain’t so bad, but then he ain’t so good, either.  Specially, he ain’t so good at ridin’—­you know what bowed legs he’s got, Kate?”

“I remember, Buck.”

She was looking at him, at last, and he talked eagerly to turn that look into a smile.

“Well, they was the three of us got after one two year old—­a bull and a bad ’un.  Shorty was on one side and me and Cuttle was on the other side.  Shorty daubed his rope and made a fair catch, but when his hoss set back the rope busted plumb in two.  Now, Shorty, he had an idea that he could ease the work of his hoss a whole pile if he laid holts on the rope whenever his hoss set down to flop a cow.  So Shorty, he had holt on this rope and was pulling back hard when the rope busted, and Shorty, he spilled backwards out’n that saddle like he’d been kicked out.

“Whilst he was lyin’ there, the bull, that had took a header when the rope busted, come up on his feet agin, and I’ll tell a man he was rarin’ mad!  He seen Shorty lyin’ on the ground, and he took a run for Shorty.  Me and Cuttle was laughin’ so hard we couldn’t barely swing our ropes, but I made a throw and managed to get that bull around both horns.  So my Betty sits down and braces herself for the tug.

“In the meantime little Shorty, he sits up and lays a hand to his head, and same time he sees that bull come tarin’ for him.  Up he jumps.  And jest then the bull come to the end of the line and wonk!—­down he goes, head over heels, and hits the sand with a bang that must of jostled his liver some, I’ll be sayin’!