Curly paused for another chew of tobacco, then went on again.

“Well, it’s like this, you see; the backbone of a man or a horse is full of little humps—­you can see that easy in the springtime.  Now old Pinto’s back, it looked like a topygraphical survey of the whole Rocky Mountain range.

“Doc he runs his hand up and down along this high divide, and says he, ‘Just like I thought,’ says he.  ’The patient has suffered a distinct leeshun in the immediate vicinity of his vaseline motor centres.’”

“You mean the vaso-motor centres,” suggested Dan Anderson.

“That’s what I said,” said Curly, aggressively.

“Now, when we all heard Doc say them words we knowed he was shore scientific, and we come up clost while the examination was progressin’.

“‘Most extraordinary,’ says Doc, feelin’ some more.  ’Now, here is a distant luxation in the lumber regions.’  He talked like Pinto had a wooden leg.

“’I should diagnose great cerebral excitation, along with pernounced ocular hesitation,’ says Doc at last.

“‘Now look here, Doc,’ says Tom Redmond to him then.  ’You go careful.  We all know there’s something strange about this here horse; but now, if he’s got any bone pressin’ on him anywhere that makes him run the way he does, why, you be blamed careful not to monkey with that there particular bone.  Don’t you touch his runnin’ bone, because that’s all right the way it is.’

“‘Don’t you worry any,’ says the Doc.  ’All I should do would only be to increase his nerve supply.  In time I could remedy his ocular defecks, too,’ says he.  He allows that if we will give him time, he can make Pinto’s eyes straighten out so’s he’ll look like a new rockin’ horse Christmas mornin’ at a church festerval.  Incidentally he suggests that we get a tall leather blinder and run it down Pinto’s nose, right between his eyes.

“This last was what caught us most of all.  ‘This here blinder idea,’ says Tom Redmond, ’is plumb scientific.  The trouble with us cow punchers is we ain’t got no brains—­or we wouldn’t be cow punchers!  Now look here, Pinto’s right eye looks off to the left, and his left eye looks off to the right.  Like enough he sees all sorts of things on both sides of him, and gets ’em mixed.  Now, you put this here harness leather between his eyes, and his right eye looks plumb into it on one side, and his left eye looks into it on the other.  Result is, he can’t see nothing at all!  Now, if he’ll only run when he’s blind, why, we can skin them Socorro people till it seems like a shame.’

“Well, right then we all felt money in our pockets.  We seemed most too good to be out ridin’ sign, or pullin’ old cows out of mudholes.  ’You leave all that to me,’ says Doc.  ’By the time I’ve worked on this patient’s nerve centres for a while, I’ll make a new horse out of him.  You watch me,’ says he.  That made us all feel cheerful.  We thought this wasn’t such a bad world, after all.