n took hold of
me that I was a helpless baby and that my mother was beside me,
turning a crank and making it rain into my mouth, and that all I had
to do was to lie still and listen to her voice and hold my mouth open
so that the drops could trickle down my throat. Lord! How good they
did feel! That was how I happened to lie still so contentedly."

"Nick could quiet a whole insane asylum when he gets on that
Blarneystone brogue of his," said Emerson.

All that day they did not allow Wellesly to do much talking, but kept
him lying most of the time in the hammock, in the shade of the
cottonwoods, where he slept or luxuriously spent the time slowly
swallowing the cool drinks the others brought to him.

In the early evening of the next day, when he had sufficiently
recovered his strength, they heard his story. He lay in the hammock,
with the mountain breeze blowing across his face and a pitcher of cold
tea beside him, and told them all that had happened to him from the
time he started for Las Plumas until consciousness failed him, with
his hands against the solid wall of Mead's house. The three tall
Texans listened gravely, Mead and Tuttle sitting one on each side of
the hammock and Ellhorn leaning against the tree at its foot. They
said nothing, but their eyes were fastened on his with the keenest
interest, and now and then they exchanged a nod or a look of
appreciation. When he finished silence fell on the group for a moment.
Then Mead stretched out a sun-browned hand and shook Wellesly's.

"I've never been a friend of yours, Mr. Wellesly," he said, "or
considered you one of mine. But I want to say, right now, that you've
got more grit than anybody I know in the southwest, and I'm proud to
have had the chance to save as brave a man as you are."

Tuttle seized Wellesly's other hand and exclaimed, "That's so! That's
straight talk! I'm with you there, Emerson!"

Ellhorn walked up to Wellesly's side and put his hand in a brotherly
way on the invalid's arm.

"I tell you what, Mr. Wellesly, we've fought you and the cattle
company straight from the shoulder, and I reckon we're likely to keep
on fightin' you as long as you fight us, but if you're goin' to give
us the sort of war you showed that desert--well, I reckon Emerson will
need all the help Tom and me can give him!"

Wellesly laughed in an embarrassed way and Ellhorn went on: "Now, just
see how things turn out. There's been another war over in Las Plumas
and we-a