“You know I’ve had a toothache!” snorted Johnny with a show of indignation, his face as sober as that of a judge.

“An’ you’ll have a stomach ache from lack of grub if you don’t earn yore right to eat purty soon,” retorted Buck.  “You ain’t had a toothache in yore whole life, an’ you don’t know what one is.  G’wan, now, or I’ll give you a backache that’ll ache!”

“Huh!  Devil of a way to treat a sick man!” Johnny retorted, but he departed exultantly, whistling with much noise and no music.  But he was sorry for one thing:  he sincerely regretted that he had not been present when Hopalong met his Waterloo.  It would have been pleasing to look upon.

While the outfit blessed the proposed lease of range that took him out of their small circle for a time, Hopalong rode farther and farther into the northwest, frequently lost in abstraction which, judging by its effect upon him, must have been caused by something serious.  He had not heard from Dave Wilkes about that individual’s good horse which had been loaned to Ben Ferris, of Winchester.  Did Dave think he had been killed or was still pursuing the man whose neck-kerchief had aroused such animosity in Hopalong’s heart?  Or had the horse actually been returned?  The animal was a good one, a successful contender in all distances from one to five miles, and had earned its owner and backers much money—­and Hopalong had parted with it as easily as he would have borrowed five dollars from Red.  The story, as he had often reflected since, was as old as lying—­a broken-legged horse, a wife dying forty miles away, and a horse all saddled which needed only to be mounted and ridden.

These thoughts kept him company for a day and when he dismounted before Stevenson’s “Hotel” in Hoyt’s Corners he summed up his feelings for the enlightenment of his horse.

“Damn it, bronc!  I’d give ten dollars right now to know if I was a jackass or not,” he growled.  “But he was an awful slick talker if he lied.  An’ I’ve got to go up an’ face Dave Wilkes to find out about it!”

Mr. Cassidy was not known by sight to the citizens of Hoyt’s Corners, however well versed they might be in his numerous exploits of wisdom and folly.  Therefore the habitues of Stevenson’s Hotel did not recognize him in the gloomy and morose individual who dropped his saddle on the floor with a crash and stamped over to the three-legged table at dusk and surlily demanded shelter for the night.

“Gimme a bed an’ something to eat,” he demanded, eyeing the three men seated with their chairs tilted against the wall.  “Do I get ’em?” he asked, impatiently.

“You do,” replied a one-eyed man, lazily arising and approaching him.  “One dollar, now.”

“An’ take the rocks outen that bed—­I want to sleep.”

“A dollar per for every rock you find,” grinned Stevenson, pleasantly.  “There ain’t no rocks in my beds,” he added.

“Some folks likes to be rocked to sleep,” facetiously remarked one of the pair by the wall, laughing contentedly at his own pun.  He bore all the ear-marks of being regarded as the wit of the locality—­every hamlet has one; I have seen some myself.