gold and flaming crimson, when Conniston
awoke. He sat up rubbing his eyes, at first at a loss to account for
his surroundings. Then he saw Hapgood sprawled at his side and
remembered. And then, too, he saw what it was that had awakened him.

A man in a buckboard drawn by two sweating horses was looking
curiously at him while his horses drank noisily at the trough. He was
an unmistakable son of the West, bronzed and lean and quick-eyed. The
long hair escaping from under his battered gray hat vied with his long
drooping mustache in color, and they both challenged the flaming
crimson of the sunset. Conniston told himself that he had never seen
hair one-half so fiery or eyes approaching the brilliant blueness of
this man's. And he told himself, too, that he had never been gladder
to see a fellow human being. For the horses were headed toward the
hills in the south.

"How are you?" Conniston cried, scrambling to his feet and striding
with heavy feet to the buckboard.

"Howdy, stranger?" answered the red-headed man, his voice strangely
low-toned and gentle.

"My name's Conniston," went on the young man, putting out a hand which
the other took after eying him keenly.

"Real nice name," replied the red-headed man. And dropping Conniston's
hand and turning to his horses, "Hey there, Lady! Quit that blowin'
bubbles an' drink, or I'll pull your ol' head off'n you!"

Lady seemed to have understood, and thrust her nose deeper into the
water. And the new-comer, catching his reins between his knees, took
papers and tobacco from the pocket of a sagging, unbuttoned vest and
made a cigarette. Licking the paper as a final touch, his eyes went to
Hapgood.

"Pardner sick or something?"

"No. Just fagged out. We came all the way from Indian Creek since
morning."

"That's real far, ain't it?" remarked the man in the buckboard, with a
little twitch to the corner of his mouth, but much deep gravity in his
eye. "Which way you goin', stranger?"

"We're going across the hills into the Half Moon country. It's forty
miles farther, they tell me."

"Uh-uh. That's what they call it. An' a darn long forty mile, or I'll
put in with you."

"And," Conniston hurried on, "if you are going--You are going the same
way, aren't you?"

"Sure. I'm goin' right straight to the Half Moon corrals."

"Then would you mind if my friend rode with you? I'll pay whatever is
right."

The other eyed him strangely. "I reckon you're from the East, maybe?