Andy reached over and put a stick of wood on the fire.  “Well, seein’ it’s your hat, I reckon you got a right to know how them holes come in it.”  And he told Pete of his ride, and how he had misled the posse, and he spoke jestingly, as though it had been a little thing to do; hardly worth repeating.  Then he told of a ride he had made to Showdown to let Pete know that Gary would live, and how The Spider had said that he knew nothing of Pete—­had never seen him.  And of how Ma Bailey upheld Pete, despite all local gossip and the lurid newspaper screeds.  And that the boys would be mighty glad to see him again; concluding with an explanation of his own presence there—­that he had been over to the T-Bar-T to see Houck about some of his stock that had strayed through some “down-fence”—­“She’s all fenced now,” he explained—­and had run into a bunch of wild turkeys, chased them to a rim-rock and had managed to shoot one, but had had to climb down a canon to recover the bird, which had set him back considerably on his home journey.  “And that there bird is hangin’ right on my saddle now!” he concluded.  “And I ain’t et since mornin’.”

“Then we eat,” asserted Pete.  “You go git that turkey, and I’ll do the rest.”

Wild turkey, spitted on a cedar limb and broiled over a wood fire, a bannock or two with hot coffee in an empty bean-can (Pete insisted on Andy using the one cup), tastes just a little better than anything else in the world, especially if one has ridden far in the high country—­and most folk do, before they get the wild turkey.

It was three o’clock when they turned in, to share Pete’s one blanket, and then Andy was too full of Pete’s adventures to sleep, asking an occasional question which Pete answered, until Andy, suddenly recalling that Pete had told him The Spider had left him his money, asked Pete if he had packed all that dough with him, or banked it in El Paso.  To which Pete had replied drowsily, “Sure thing, Miss Gray.”  Whereupon Andy straightway decided that he would wait till morning before asking any further questions of an intimate nature.

Pete was strangely quiet the nest morning, in fact almost taciturn, and Andy noticed that he went into the saddle a bit stiffly.  “That—­where you got hurt botherin’ you, Pete?” he asked with real solicitude.

“Some.”  And realizing that he had scarcely spoken to his old chum since they awakened, he asked him many questions about the ranch, and the boys, as they drifted across the mesa and down the trail that led to the Concho.

But it was not the twinge of his old wound that made Pete so silent.  He was suffering a disappointment.  He had believed sincerely that what he had been through, in the past six months especially, had changed him—­that he would have to have a mighty stern cause to pull a gun on a man again; and at the first hint of danger he had been ready to kill.  He wondered if he would ever lose that hunted feeling that had brought