The next morning at breakfast Paloma announced, “Father, you must help Dave hunt down these cattle thieves.”

“Ain’t that sort of a big order?” Blaze queried.

“Perhaps, but you’re the very man to do it.  Ricardo Guzman is the only person who knows the Lewis gang as well as you do.”

Jones shook his head doubtfully.  “Don Ricardo has been working up his own private feud with that outfit.  If I was the kind that went looking for a fight, I wouldn’t have paid freight on myself from the Panhandle down here.  I could have got one right at home, any morning before breakfast.”

“Ricardo Guzman is something of a black sheep himself,” Law spoke up.

“Pshaw!  He’s all right.  I reckon he has changed a few brands in his time, but so has everybody else.  Why, that’s how ‘Old Ed’ Austin got his start.  If a cowman tells you he never stole anything, he’s either a dam’ good liar or a dam’ bad roper.  But Ricardo’s going straight enough now.”

“He has lost his share of stock,” Paloma explained, “and he’ll work with you if father asks him.  You go along with Dave—–­”

“I’m too busy,” Blaze demurred, “and I ain’t feeling good.  I had bad dreams all night.”

“I don’t want you around here this morning.  That new dressmaker is coming.”

Jones rose abruptly from the table.  “I reckon my business can wait.  Hustle up, Dave.”  A few moments later, as they were saddling their horses, he lamented:  “What did I tell you?  Here I go, on the dodge from a dressmaker.  I s’pose I’ve got to live like a road-agent now, till something happens.”

Don Ricardo Guzman was an American, but he spoke no English.  An accident of birth had made him a citizen of the United States—­his father having owned a ranch which lay north instead of south of the Rio Grande.  Inasmuch as the property had fallen to Ricardo, his sons, too, were Yankees in the eyes of the law.  But in all other respects Don Ricardo and his family differed not at all from the many Guzmans who lived across the border.  The Guzman ranch comprised a goodly number of acres, and, since live stock multiply rapidly, its owner had in some sort prospered.  On the bank of a resaca—–­a former bed of the Rio Grande—­stood the house, an adobe structure, square, white, and unprotected from the sun by shrub or tree.  Behind it were some brush corrals and a few scattered mud jacals, in which lived the help.

Ricardo had just risen from a siesta when his two visitors rode up, and he made them welcome with the best he had.  There followed a complimentary exchange of greetings and the usual flow of small talk.  Ricardo had suffered a severe toothache—­the same abominable affliction that had lost Porfirio Diaz an empire.  It had been a dry spring, but, praise God, the water still held in the resaca—­ his two sons were branding calves in one of the outer pastures—­ and there had been a very good calf crop indeed.  Blaze recounted his own doings; Law told of Ranger activities along the lower border.  In the cool of the afternoon Ricardo rode with his visitors, and then, cordial relations being now established, he began to divulge information of value to Law.