The cool, soft breath of evening filled the air, the alfalfa field glowed its most vivid emerald in the yellow rays of the setting sun, and in the same rich light the gray, barren hillside beyond shone like beaten gold.  And Texas Bill, just in from a week’s trip on the range, soothed and inspired by the civilizing influences of the ranch-house, a shave, clean clothes, and his supper, unbent from his usual bashful dignity and talked.

Texas Bill was tall and big and loose-jointed, and he spoke always in a long, soft, indifferent drawl.  He held two articles of belief which no man might dispute without getting sight of the knife in his bootleg or the revolver on his hip.  One was that Texas was the biggest and best State in the Union; and the other, that the cow business was no longer fit for a gentleman to follow.  He lounged on a bench beside the door and told me tales of the range and the round-up, of herds of cattle stampeded by the smell of water, of long rides in blinding sand storms, of the taking in of the tenderfoot, of centipedes and side-winders, of Indian fights and narrow escapes.

“Were you ever in one of these Indian attacks yourself?” I asked, for his Indian yarns had been about other men.

Texas Bill solemnly considered the heel of his boot a moment, and then just as solemnly replied: 

“Yes, I was killed by the Apaches oncet.”

He turned a serious face off toward Cooke’s Peak, which towered, a mighty, sculptured mass of purest sapphire blue, against a turquoise sky; and I, seeing that his countenance bore just such an expression of inscrutable solemnity as it might have done had he been acting as chief mourner at his own funeral, answered just as soberly: 

“That must have been very interesting!  I wish you would tell me about it.”

His gaze returned to his feet, his face relaxed into a smile, a chuckle began somewhere in his throat, wandered down his long frame and lost itself in his boots, which were high-heeled and two sizes too small for him.  Then he spoke again: 

“That was the time we run a blaze on Pard Huff.”

Then he relapsed into silence, contemplation of his boots, and several successive and long-drawn chuckles.  But at last he began his story.

“You see, Pard Huff, he was a tenderfoot, and there was n’t nothin’ he was n’t afraid of a-tall.  You could n’t convince him that coyotes ain’t dangerous; and he thought it was sure death if a tarantula looked at him; and you could make him jump out of his boots any time by just buzzin’ your tongue behind his ear.  I reckon he ’d have sure died of fright if he had ever seen a live rattlesnake spittin’ its tongue at him.

“And Injuns!  Well, he watched for Apaches all day long a durn sight more ‘n he did for cattle, and he could n’t sleep nights for bein’ afraid they ’d catch him.  He did n’t seem to think of anything but Apaches, and he had n’t been with us very long till the boys did n’t give him a chanst to think of anything else a-tall.