“How long before sunset now?” asked Buck Daniels sharply.

“Maybe a couple of hours.”

“A couple of hours,” repeated Daniels, and ground his knuckles across his forehead.  “A couple of hours!”

He raised his glass with a jerky motion and downed the contents; the chaser stood disregarded before him and O’Brien regarded his patron with an eye of admiration.

“You long for these parts?” he asked.

“No, I’m strange to this range.  Riding up north pretty soon, if I can get someone to tell me the lay of the land.  D’you know it?”

“Never been further north than Brownsville.”

“Couldn’t name me someone that’s travelled about, I s’pose?”

“Old Gary Peters knows every rock within three day’s riding.  He keeps the blacksmith shop across the way.”

“So?  Thanks; I’ll look him up.”

Buck Daniels found the blacksmith seated on a box before his place of business; it was a slack time for Gary Peters and he consoled himself for idleness by chewing the stem of an unlighted corn-cob, whose bowl was upside down.  His head was pulled down and forward as if by the weight of his prodigious sandy moustache, and he regarded a vague horizon with misty eyes.

“Seen you comin’ out of O’Brien’s,” said the blacksmith, as Buck took possession of a nearby box.  “What’s the news?”

“Ain’t any news,” responded Buck dejectedly.  “Too much talk; no news.”

“That’s right,” nodded Gary Peters.  “O’Brien is the out-talkingest man I ever see.  Ain’t nobody on Brownsville can get his tongue around so many words as O’Brien.”

So saying, he blew through his pipe, picked up a stick of soft pine, and began to whittle it to a point.

“In my part of the country,” went on Buck Daniels, “they don’t lay much by a man that talks a pile.”

Here the blacksmith turned his head slowly, regarded his companion for an instant, and then resumed his whittling.

“But,” said Daniels, with a sigh, “if I could find a man that knowed the country north of Brownsville and had a hobble on his tongue I could give him a night’s work that’d be worth while.”

Gary Peters removed his pipe from his mouth and blew out his dropping moustaches.  He turned one wistful glance upon his idle forge; he turned a sadder eye upon his companion.

“I could name you a silent man or two in Brownsville,” he said, “but there ain’t only one man that knows the country right.”

“That so?  And who might he be?”

“Me.”

“You?” echoed Daniels in surprise.  He turned and considered Gary as if for the first time.  “Maybe you know the lay of the land up as far as Hawkin’s Arroyo?”

“Me?  Son, I know every cactus clear to Bald Eagle.”

“H-m-m!” muttered Daniels.  “I s’pose maybe you could name some of the outfits from here on a line with Bald Eagle—­say you put ’em ten miles apart?”