and mandolin cases roped
on top of Sunfish's pack, and he pointed and gobbled something which had
the sound speech without being intelligible. Bud cocked an ear toward
him inquiringly, made nothing of the jumble and rode off to the cabin,
leading Sunfish after him. The fellow might or might not be the idiot he
looked, and he might or might not keep his hands off the pack. Bud was
not going to take any chance.

He heard sounds within the cabin, but no one appeared until he shouted,
"Hello!" twice. The door opened then and Bart Nelson put out his head,
his jaws working over a mouthful of food that seemed tough.

"Oh, it's you. C'm awn in an' eat," he invited, and Bud dismounted,
never guessing that his slightest motion had been carefully observed
from the time he had forded the creek at the foot of the slope beyond
the cabin.

Bart introduced him to the men by the simple method of waving his hand
at the group around the table and saying, "Guess you know the boys.
What'd yuh say we could call yuh?"

"Bud--ah--Birnie," Bud answered, swiftly weighing the romantic idea of
using some makeshift name until he had made his fortune, and deciding
against it. A false name might mean future embarrassment, and he was so
far from home that his father would never hear of him anyway. But his
hesitation served to convince every man there that Birnie was not his
name, and that he probably had good cause for concealing his own. Adding
that to Dirk Tracy's guess that he was from Jackson's Hole, the sum
spelled outlaw.

The Muleshoe boys were careful not to seem curious about Bud's past.
They even refrained from manifesting too much interest in the musical
instruments until Bud himself took them out of their cases that evening
and began tuning them. Then the half-baked, tongue-tied fellow came over
and gobbled at him eagerly.

"Hen wants yuh to play something," a man they called Day interpreted.
"Hen's loco on music. If you can sing and play both, Hen'll set and
listen till plumb daylight and never move an eyewinker."

Bud looked up, smiled a little because Hen had no eyewinkers to move,
and suddenly felt pity because a man could be so altogether unlikeable
as Hen. Also because his mother's face stood vividly before him for
an instant, leaving him with a queer tightening of the throat and
the feeling that he had been rebuked. He nodded to Hen, laid down the
mandolin and picked up the guitar, turned up the a string a bit, laid
a boot