“Yes.  I can give them plenty to do on the other end.”

“That’s good.  An’ you can ride out again, at night, you know, Buck, an’ smuggle me some more grub, can’t you?”

“Yes.  But....”

“Wait a minute!  I know a man in Hill’s Corners as’ll give me a han’.  I done him favours before now, same as I done for you, Buck.  An’ he knows the ropes up here.  You can git word to him, can’t you?  An’ then I’ll drift, an’ he’ll look out for me, an’ you’ll be square with what I done for you, Buck.  Will you do it?”

“Yes, Jimmie.  I’ll do it.  I’ll ride in and see your man at the Corners.  Who is it, Jimmie?”

“An’ you won’t tell nobody but him, will you, Buck?”

“No.  I won’t tell any one else.  Who is it?”

“It’s a man as may be crooked with some,” said Clayton slowly.  “But he’s awful square with a pal.  It’s a man name of Bedloe.  They call him the Kid.”

CHAPTER XV

THE KID

So the next day Buck Thornton rode away to the south and to Hill’s Corners.

He had planned to have his errand over early, to have seen the Kid and to have turned back toward the ranch before noon.  For he knew the town’s habit of late sleeping and he wanted to be gone from it before it was awake and pouring into its long street and into its many swinging doors the stream of men whom he had no wish to see now.  Perfectly well he knew how easily he could find trouble there, and it seemed to him that he had enough on his hands already without seeking to add to it.

But the press of range business kept him later than he had thought it would.  And then the one horse on the range he would ride today had to be found out in the hills and roped.

“For,” he told himself grimly, “if I’m going to stick my nose in that man’s town I’m going to have a horse between my knees that knows how to do something more than creep!  And when it comes to horses there’s only one real horse I ever saw.  I got you, Comet, you old son-of-a-gun!”

And his rope flew out and its wide noose landed with much precision, drawing tight about the neck of a great, lean barrelled, defiant-eyed four-year-old that in the midst of its headlong flight stopped with feet bunched together before the rope had grown taut.  The animal, standing now like a horse cut from a block of grey granite, chiselled by the hands of a great sculptor who at the same time was a great lover of equine perfection, swung about upon its captor, its eyes blazing, just a little quiver of the clean-cut nostrils showing the red satin of the skin lining them.  The mane was like a tumbled silken skein, the ears dainty and small and keen pointed, the chest splendidly deep and strong; the forelegs small, so slender that to a man who did not know a horse they would have seemed fragile but only because they were all bone and sinew like steel and muscle hardened and stripped clean of the last milligram of fat, as exquisite as the perfect ankle of a high bred woman.