After a hearty supper Hayes joined the smokers about the fire.  His appearance did not settle all the questions in the minds of his brother rangers.  They saw simply a loose, lank youth with tow-coloured, sun-burned hair and a berry-brown, ingenuous face that wore a quizzical, good-natured smile.

“Fellows,” said the new ranger, “I’m goin’ to interduce to you a lady friend of mine.  Ain’t ever heard anybody call her a beauty, but you’ll all admit she’s got some fine points about her.  Come along, Muriel!”

He held open the front of his blue flannel shirt.  Out of it crawled a horned frog.  A bright red ribbon was tied jauntily around its spiky neck.  It crawled to its owner’s knee and sat there, motionless.

“This here Muriel,” said Hayes, with an oratorical wave of his hand, “has got qualities.  She never talks back, she always stays at home, and she’s satisfied with one red dress for every day and Sunday, too.”

“Look at that blame insect!” said one of the rangers with a grin.  “I’ve seen plenty of them horny frogs, but I never knew anybody to have one for a side-partner.  Does the blame thing know you from anybody else?”

“Take it over there and see,” said Hayes.

The stumpy little lizard known as the horned frog is harmless.  He has the hideousness of the prehistoric monsters whose reduced descendant he is, but he is gentler than the dove.

The ranger took Muriel from Hayes’s knee and went back to his seat on a roll of blankets.  The captive twisted and clawed and struggled vigorously in his hand.  After holding it for a moment or two, the ranger set it upon the ground.  Awkwardly, but swiftly the frog worked its four oddly moving legs until it stopped close by Hayes’s foot.

“Well, dang my hide!” said the other ranger.  “The little cuss knows you.  Never thought them insects had that much sense!”

II

Jimmy Hayes became a favourite in the ranger camp.  He had an endless store of good-nature, and a mild, perennial quality of humour that is well adapted to camp life.  He was never without his horned frog.  In the bosom of his shirt during rides, on his knee or shoulder in camp, under his blankets at night, the ugly little beast never left him.

Jimmy was a humourist of a type that prevails in the rural South and West.  Unskilled in originating methods of amusing or in witty conceptions, he had hit upon a comical idea and clung to it reverently.  It had seemed to Jimmy a very funny thing to have about his person, with which to amuse his friends, a tame horned frog with a red ribbon around its neck.  As it was a happy idea, why not perpetuate it?

The sentiments existing between Jimmy and the frog cannot be exactly determined.  The capability of the horned frog for lasting affection is a subject upon which we have had no symposiums.  It is easier to guess Jimmy’s feelings.  Muriel was his chef d’oeuvre of wit, and as such he cherished her.  He caught flies for her, and shielded her from sudden northers.  Yet his care was half selfish, and when the time came she repaid him a thousand fold.  Other Muriels have thus overbalanced the light attentions of other Jimmies.