“Just about.  Shucks!  I was in hopes you’d stay overnight with us.  Bill and me, we ain’t seen no one since Columbus crossed the Delaware in fourteen-ninety-two.  Can’t ye, now?” urged the tall man coaxingly.  “We’ll pitch horseshoes—­play cards if you want to; only Bill and me’s pretty well burnt out at cards.  Fox and geese too—­ever play fox and geese?  We got a dandy fox-and-goose board—­but Bill, he natcherly can’t play.  He’s from California, Bill is.”

“Aw, shut up on that!” growled Bill.

“Sorry,” said Pete, “I’m pushed.  Got to go on to-night.  Want to take that train at seven-thirty in the morning, and a small sleep for myself before that.  Maybe I’ll stop over as I come back, though.  Fine feed you got here.  Makes a jim-darter of a horse camp.”

“Yes, ’tis.  We aim to keep the cattle shoved off so we can save the grass for the saddle ponies.”

“Must have quite a bunch?”

“‘Bout two hundred.  Well, sorry you can’t stay with us.  We was fixin’ to round up what cows had drifted in and give ’em a push back to the main range this afternoon.  But they’ll keep.  We’ll stick round camp; and you stay as late as you can, stranger, and we’ll stir up something.  I’ll tell you what, Bill—­we’ll pull off that shootin’ match you was blowin’ about.”  The tall man favored Johnson with a confidential wink.  “Bill, he allows he can shoot right peart.  Bill’s from California.”

Bill, the short man, produced a gray-and-yellow tobacco sack and extracted a greasy ten-dollar greenback, which he placed on the box table at Johnson’s elbow.

“Cover that, durn you!  You hold stakes, stranger.  I’ll show him California.  Humph!  Dam’ wall-eyed Tejano!”

“I’m a Texan myself,” twinkled Johnson.

“What if you are?  You ain’t wall-eyed, be you?  And you ain’t been makin’ no cracks at California—­not to me.  But this here Jim—­look at the white-eyed, tow-headed grinnin’ scoundrel, will you?—­Say, are you goin’ to cover that X or are you goin’ to crawfish?”

“Back down?  You peevish little sawed-off runt!” yelped Jim.  “I been lettin’ you shoot off your head so’s you’ll be good and sore afterward.  I always wanted a piece of paper money any way—­for a keepsake.  You wait!”

He went into the cabin and returned with a tarnished gold piece and a box of forty-five cartridges.

“Here, stakeholder!” he said to Johnson.

Then, to Bill:  “Now, then, old Californy—­you been all swelled-up and stumping me for quite some time.  Show us what you got!”

It was an uncanny exhibition of skill that followed.  These men knew how to handle a sixshooter.  They began with tin cans at ten yards, thirty, fifty—­and hit them.  They shot at rolling cans, and hit them; at high-thrown cans, and hit them; at cards nailed to hitching-posts; then at the pips of cards.  Neither man could boast of any advantage.  The few and hairbreadth misses of the card pips, the few