“You can make good!” he said calmly.  “I know it.  All you need is a chance to pull up.  Seeing you won’t give yourself one, I’m giving it to you.  You’ll do for me what you won’t do for yourself, Ford—­and if there’s a yellow streak in you, I never got a glimpse of it; and the yellow will sure come to the surface of a man when he’s bucking a proposition like you and me bucked for two months.  You didn’t lay down on that job, and you were just a kid, you might say.  Gosh, Ford, I’d bank on you any old time—­put you on your mettle, and I would!  You can make good here—­and damn it, you will!”

“I wish I was as sure of that as you seem to be,” Ford muttered uneasily, and turned away.  Mason’s easy chuckle followed him, and Ford swung about and faced him again.

“I haven’t made any cast-iron promise—­”

“Did I ask you to make any?” Mason’s voice sharpened.

“But—­Lordy me, Ches!  How do you know I—­”

“I know.  That’s enough.”

“But—­maybe I don’t want the darned job.  I never said—­”

Mason was studying him, as a man studies the moods of an untamed horse.  “I didn’t think you’d dodge,” he drawled, and the blood surged answeringly to Ford’s cheeks.  “You do want it.”

“If I should happen to get jagged up in good shape, about the first thing I’d do would be to lick the stuffing out of you for being such a simple-minded cuss,” Ford prophesied grimly, as one who knows well whereof he speaks.

“Ye-es—­but you won’t get jagged.”

“Oh, Lord!  I wish you’d quit believing in me!  You used to have some sense,” Ford grumbled.  But he reached out and clenched his fingers upon Mason’s arm so tight that Mason set his teeth, and he looked at him long, as if there was much that he would like to put into words and could not.  “Say!  You’re white clear down to your toes, Ches,” he said finally, and walked away hurriedly with his hat jerked low over his eyes.

Mason looked after him as long as he was in sight, and afterwards took off his hat, and wiped beads of perspiration from his forehead.  “Gosh!” he whispered fervently.  “That was nip and tuck—­but I got him, thank the Lord!” Whereupon he blew his nose violently, and went up to his supper with his hands in his pockets and his humorous lips pursed into a whistle.

Before long he was back, chuckling to himself as he bore down upon Ford in the corral, where he was industriously rubbing Rambler’s sprained shoulder with liniment.

“The wife says you’ve got to come up to the house,” he announced gleefully.  “You’ve gone and done the heroic again, and she wants to do something to show her gratitude.”

“You go back and tell your wife that I’m a bold, bad man and I won’t come.”  Ford, to prove his sincerity, sat down upon the stout manger there, and crossed his legs with an air of finality.