“Thought you was goin’ over to see Montoya!” he challenged as he saw the Mexican youth, whom he had tentatively hired, sitting placidly on the store veranda, employed solely in gazing at the road as though it were a most interesting spectacle.  “Oh, manana,” drawled the Mexican.

“Manana, nothin’!” volleyed Pete.  “You’re goin’ now!  Git a-movin’—­if you have to take your hands and lift your doggone feet off the ground.  Git a-goin’!”

“Oh, maybe I go manana.”

“You’re dreamin’, hombre.”  Pete was desperate.  Again he saw his chance of an immediate job go glimmering down the vague vistas of many to-morrows.

“See here!  What kind of a guy are you, anyhow?  I come in here yesterday and offered you a job and you promised you’d git to work right away.  You—­”

“It was to-day you speak of Montoya,” corrected the Mexican.

“You’re dreamin’,” reiterated Pete.  “It was yesterday you said you would go manana.  Well, it’s to-morrow, ain’t it?  You been asleep an’ don’t know it.”

An expression of childish wonder crossed the Mexican youth’s stolid face.  Of a certainty it was but this very morning that Montoya’s boy had spoken to him!  Or was it yesterday morning?  Montoya’s boy had said it was yesterday morning.  It must be so.  The youth rose and gazed about him.  Pete stood aggressively potent, frowning down on the other’s hesitation.

“I go,” said the Mexican.

Pete heaved a sigh of relief.  “A fella’s got to know how to handle ’em,” he told the immediate vicinity.  And because Pete knew something about “handlin’ ’em,” he did not at once go for the horse, but stood staring after the Mexican, who had paused to glance back.  Pete waved his hand in a gesture which meant, “Keep goin’.”  The Mexican youth kept going.

“I ain’t wishin’ old Jose any hard luck,” muttered Pete, “but I said I’d send a boy—­and that there walkin’ dream looks like one, anyhow.  ‘Oh, manana!’” he snorted.  “Mexicans is mostly figurin’ out to-day what they ‘re goin’ to do to-morrow, and they never git through figurin’.  I dunno who my father and mother was, but I know one thing—­they wa’n’t Mexicans.”

CHAPTER IX

ROWDY—­AND BLUE SMOKE

It has been said that Necessity is the mother of Invention—­well, it goes without saying that the cowboy is the father, and Pete was closely related to these progenitors of that most necessary adjunct of success.  Moreover, he could have boasted a coat of arms had he been at all familiar with heraldry and obliged to declare himself.

[Illustration:  Pete.]

A pinto cayuse rampant; a longhorn steer regardant; two sad-eyed, unbranded calves couchant—­one in each corner of the shield to kind of balance her up; gules, several clumps of something representing sagebrush; and possibly a rattlesnake coiled beneath the sagebrush and described as “repellent” and holding in his open jaws a streaming motto reading, “I’m a-comin’.”