Had it been essential that Pete’s escutcheon should bear the bar sinister, doubtless he would have explained its presence with the easy assertion that the dark diagonal represented the vague ancestry of the two sad-eyed calves couchant.  Anybody could see that the calves were part longhorn and part Hereford!

Pete rode out of Concho glittering in his new-found glory of shining bit and spur, wide-brimmed Stetson, and chaps studded with nickel-plated conchas.  The creak of the stiff saddle-leather was music to him.  His brand-new and really good equipment almost made up for the horse—­an ancient pensioner that never seemed to be just certain when he would take his next step and seemed a trifle surprised when he had taken it.  He was old, amiable, and willing, internally, but his legs, somewhat of the Chippendale order, had seen better days.  Ease and good feeding had failed to fill him out.  He was past taking on flesh.  Roth kept him about the place for short trips.  Roth’s lively team of pintos were at the time grazing in a distant summer pasture.

Rowdy—­the horse—­seemed to feel that the occasion demanded something of him.  He pricked his ears as they crossed the canon bottom and breasted the ascent as bravely as his three good legs would let him.  At the top he puffed hard.  Despite Pete’s urging, he stood stolidly until he had gathered enough ozone to propel him farther.  “Git along, you doggone ole cockroach!” said Pete.  But Rowdy was firm.  He turned his head and gazed sadly at his rider with one mournful eye that said plainly, “I’m doing my level best.”  Pete realized that the ground just traveled was anything but level, and curbed his impatience.  “I’ll jest kind o’ save him for the finish,” he told himself.  “Then I’ll hook the spurs into him and ride in a-boilin’.  Don’t care what he does after that.  He can set down and rest if he wants to.  Git along, old soap-foot,” he cried—­“soap-foot” possibly because Rowdy occasionally slipped.  His antique legs didn’t always do just what he wanted them to do.

Topping the mesa edge, Pete saw the distant green that fringed the Concho home-ranch, topped by a curl of smoke that drifted lazily across the gold of the morning.  Without urging, Rowdy broke into a stiff trot, that sounded Pete’s inmost depths, despite his natural good seat in the saddle.  “Quit it!” cried Pete presently.  “You’ll be goin’ on crutches afore night if you keep that up.—­And so’ll I,” he added.  Rowdy immediately stopped and turned his mournful eye on Pete.

If the trot had been the rhythmic one, two, three, four, Pete could have ridden and rolled cigarettes without spilling a flake of tobacco; but the trot was a sort of one, two—­almost three, then, whump! three and a quick four, and so on, a decidedly irregular meter in Pete’s lyrical journey toward new fields and fairer fortune.  “I’ll sure make Andy sit up!” he declared as the Concho buildings loomed beneath the