“If Slim would perk up and go run down a grouse or two,” Pink observed pointedly, “we’d be all right for the day.  How about it, Slim?”

“Run ’em down yourself,” Slim retorted.  “By golly, I ain’t no lop-ear bird dog.”

“The law’s out fer chickens,” Happy Jack remarked dolefully.

“Go on, Happy, and get us a few.  You’ve got your howitzer buckled on,” fleered Andy Green.  Andy it was whose fertile imagination had so christened Happy Jack’s formidable weapon.

“Aw, gwan!” protested Happy Jack.

“Happy looks like he was out for a rep,” bantered Pink.  “He makes me think uh the Bad Man in a Western play.  All he needs is his hat turned up in front and his sleeves rolled up to his elbow, like he was killing hogs.  Happy would make a dandy-looking outlaw, with that gun and that face uh his.”

“Say, by golly, I bet that’s what he’s figurin’ on doing.  He ain’t going to punch cows no more—­I bet he’s thinking about turning out.”

“Well, when I do, you’ll be the first fellow I lay for,” retorted Happy, with labored wit.

“You never’d get a rep shooting at a target the size uh Slim,” dimpled Pink.  “Is that toy cannon loaded, Happy?”

“I betche yuh dassen’t walk off ten paces and let me show yuh,” growled Happy.

Pink made as if to rise, then settled back with a sigh.  “Ten paces is farther than you could drive me from this fire with a club,” he said.  “And you couldn’t see me, in this fog.”

“Say, it is pretty solid,” said Weary, looking around him at the blank, gray wall.  “A fellow could sit right here and be a lot ignorant of what’s going on around him.  A fellow could—­”

“When I was riding down in the San Simon basin,” spoke up Andy, rolling his second cigarette daintily between his finger-tips, “I had a kinda queer experience in a fog, once.  It was thick as this one, and it rolled down just about as sudden and unexpected.  That’s a plenty wild patch uh country—­or it was when I was there.  I was riding for a Spanish gent that kept white men as a luxury and let the greasers do about all the rough work—­such as killing off superfluous neighbors, and running brands artistic, and the like.  Oh, he was a gay mark, all right.

“But about this other deal:  I was out riding alone after a little bunch uh hosses, one day in the fall.  I packed my gun and a pair uh field glasses, and every time I rode up onto a mesa I’d take a long look at all the lower country to save riding it.  I guess I’d prognosticated around like that for two or three hours, when I come out on a little pinnacle that slopes down gradual toward a neighbor’s home ranch—­only the ranch itself was quite a ride back up the basin.

“I got off my horse and set down on a rock to build me a smoke, and was gazing off over the country idle, when I seen a rider come up out of a little draw and gallop along quartering-like, to pass my pinnacle on the left.  You know how a man out alone like that will watch anything, from a chicken hawk up in the air to a band uh sheep, without any interest in either one, but just to have your eyes on something that’s alive and moves.