“Pish!” remarked Stan scornfully.  “Twaddle!  Tommyrot!  Pickles!”

Pete wagged a solemn forefinger.

“If you wasn’t plumb simple-minded and trustin’ you would ‘a’ tumbled long ago that somebody was putting a hoodoo on every play you make.  I caught on before you’d been here six months.  I thought, of course, you’d been doin’ dirt to some one—­till I come to know you.”

“I thank you for those kind words,” grinned Mitchell; “also, for the friendly explanation with which you cover up some bad luck and more greenhorn’s incompetence.”

“No greenhorn could be so thumbhandsided as all that,” rejoined Pete earnestly.  “Your irrigation ditches break and wash out; cattle get into your crops whenever you go to town; but your fences never break when you’re round the ranch.  Notice that?”

“I did observe something of that nature,” confessed Mitchell.  “I laid it to sheer bad luck.”

The older man snorted.

“Bad luck!  You’ve been hoodooed!  After that, you went off by your lonesome and tried cattle.  Your windmills broke down; your cattle was stole plumb opprobrious—­Mexicans blamed, of course.  And the very first winter the sheep drifted in on you—­where no sheep had never blatted before—­and eat you out of house and home.”

“I sold out in the spring,” reflected Stanley.  “I ran two hundred head of stock up to one hundred and twelve in six months.  Go on!  Your story interests me, strangely.  I begin to think I was not as big a fool as I thought I was, and that it was foolish of me to ever think my folly was—­”

Johnson interrupted him.

“Then you bought a bunch of sheep.  Son, you can’t realize how great-minded it is of me to overlook that slip of yours!  You was out of the way of every man in the world; you was on your own range, watering at your own wells—­the only case like that on record.  And the second dark night some petulant and highly anonymous cowboys run off your herder and stampeded your woollies over a bluff.”

“Sheep outrages have happened before,” observed Stan, rather dryly.

“Sheep outrages are perpetrated by cowmen on cow ranges,” rejoined Pete hotly.  “I guess I ought to know.  Sheepmen aren’t ever killed on their own ranges; it isn’t respectable.  Sheepmen are all right in their place—­and hell’s the place.”

“Peter!” said Stan.  “Such langwidge!”

“Wallop!  Wallop!” barked Peter, defiant and indignant.  “I will say wallop!  Now you shut up whilst I go on with your sad history.  Son, you was afflicted some with five-card insomnia—­and right off, when you first came, you had it fair shoved on you by people usually most disobligin’.  It wasn’t just for your money; there was plenty could stack ’em higher than you could, and them fairly achin’ to be fleeced, at that.  If your head hadn’t been attached to your shoulders good and strong, if you hadn’t figured to be about square, or maybe rectangular, you had a chance to be a poker fiend or a booze hoist.”