“Wasn’t he hurt?” The girl turned suddenly and her voice told how much it meant to her.  But Jack was not sympathetic.

“No, he wasn’t hurt.  He was just playing off.  He got us once, that way, and he’s never given up the notion that he could do it again.  We may be easy, but—­”

“I don’t understand,” the girl broke in sharply.  “Do you mean that he would deliberately try to deceive you into believing he was hurt, when he wasn’t?”

“Miss Johnson,” Jack replied sorrowfully, “he would.  He would lose valuable sleep for a month, studying up the smoothest way to deceive.  I guess,” he added artfully, and as if the subject was nearly exhausted, “yuh don’t know Mr. Green very well.”

“I remember hearing about that job he put up on yuh,” Take-Notice remarked, not noticing that the girl’s lips were opened for speech, “Yuh made a stretcher, didn’t yuh, and—­”

“No—­he told it that way, but he’s such a liar he couldn’t tell the truth if he wanted to.  We found him lying at the bottom of a steep bluff, and he appeared to be about dead.  It looked as if he’d slipped and fallen down part way.  So we packed water and sloshed in his face, and he kinda come to, and then we packed him up the bluff—­and yuh know what the Bad-lands is like, Take-Notice.  It was unmerciful hot, too, and we like to died getting him up.  At the top we laid him down and worked over him till we got him to open his eyes, and he could talk a little and said maybe he could ride if we could get him on a horse.  The—­he made us lift him into the saddle—­and considering the size of him, it was something of a contract—­and then he made as if he couldn’t stay on, even.  But first we knew he digs in the spurs, yanks off his hat and lets a yell out of him you could hear a mile, and says:  ’Much obliged, boys, it was too blamed hot to walk up that hill,’ and off he goes.”

Take-Notice stretched his legs out before him, pushed his hands deep down in his trousers’ pockets, and laughed and laughed.  “That was sure one on you,” he chuckled.  “Andy’s a hard case, all right.”

But the girl stood before him, a little pale and with her chin high.  “Father, how can you think it’s funny?” she cried impatiently.  “It seems to me—­er—­I think it’s perfectly horrid for a man to act like that.  And you say, Mr. Bates, that he’s out there now”—­she swept a very pretty hand and arm toward the window—­“acting the same silly sort of falsehood?”

“I don’t know where he is now,” Jack answered judicially.  “That’s what he was doing when we came past.”

She went to the door and stood looking vaguely out at nothing in particular, and Irish took the opportunity to kick Jack on the ankle-bone and viciously whisper, “Yuh damned chump!” But Jack smiled serenely.  Irish, he reflected, had not been with them that day in the Bad-lands, and so had not the same cause for vengeance.  He remembered that Irish had laughed, just as Take-Notice was laughing, when they told him about it; but Jack had never been able to see the joke, and his conscience did not trouble him now.