“If I was like some,” said Sundown, addressing the toad, “I’d pull me six-shooter, only I ain’t got it now, and bling you to nothin’.  Accordin’ to law you’re the injudicious cause preceding the act, which makes you guilty accordin’ to the statues of this here commonwealth, and I seen lots of ’em on the same street, in Boston, scarin’ hosses to death and makin’ kids and nuss-girls cry.  But I ain’t goin’ to shoot you.  If I was to have the sayin’ of it, I’d kind o’ like to shoot that hoss, though.  He broke as fine a pome in the middle as I ever writ, to say nothin’ of hurtin’ me personal feelin’s.  Well, so-long, leetle toad-lizard.  Just tell them that you saw me—­and they will know the rest—­if anybody was to ask you, a empty saddle and a man a-foot in the desert is sure circumvential evidence ag’in the hoss.  Wonder how far it is to the Concho?”

With many a backward glance, inspired by fond imaginings that the pinto might have stopped to graze, Sundown stalked down the road.  Waif of chance and devotee of the goddess “Maybeso,” he rose sublimely superior to the predicament in which he found himself.  “The only reason I’m goin’ east is because I ain’t goin’ west,” he told himself, ignoring, with warm adherence to the glowing courses of the sun the frigid possibilities of the poles.  Warmed by the exercise of plodding across the mesa trail in high-heeled boots, he swung out of his coat and slung it across his shoulder.  Dust gathered in the wrinkles of his boots, and more than once he stopped to mop his sweating face with his bandanna.  Rise after rise swept gently before him and within the hour he saw the misty outline of the blue hills to the south.  Slowly his moving shadow shifted, bobbing in front of him as the sun slipped toward the western horizon.  A little breeze sighed along the road and whirls of sand spun in tiny cones around the roots of the chaparral.  He reached in his pocket, drew forth a silver dollar, and examined it.  “Now if they weren’t any folks on this here earth, I reckon silver and gold and precious jools wouldn’t be worth any more than rocks and mud and gravel, eh?  Why, even if they weren’t no folks, water would be worth more to this here world than gold.  Water makes things grow and—­and keeps a fella from gettin’ thirsty.  And mud makes things grow, too, but I dunno what rocks are for.  Just to sit on when you’re tired, I reckon.”  The sibilant burring of a rattler in the brush set his neck and back tingling.  “And what snakes was made for, gets me!  They ain’t good to eat, nohow.  And they ain’t friendly like some of the bugs and things.  I’m thinkin’ that that there snake what clumb the tree and got Mrs. Eve interested in the apple business would ‘a’ been a whole lot better for folks, if he’d ‘a’ stayed up that tree and died, instead o’ runnin’ around and raisin’ young ones.  Accordin’ to my way of thinkin’ a garden ain’t a garden with a snake in it, nohow.  Now, Mrs. Eve—­if she’d had to take a hammer