a few hours.]

Curly followed his nose down the first tortuous street into which his
irresponsible feet conducted him. At the lower end of it, on the bank
of the serpentine stream, he perceived an open gate in a cemented rock
wall. Inside he saw camp fires and a row of low wooden sheds built
against three sides of the enclosing wall. He entered the enclosure.
Under the sheds many horses were champing at their oats and corn.
Many wagons and buckboards stood about with their teams' harness
thrown carelessly upon the shafts and doubletrees. Curly recognised
the place as a wagon-yard, such as is provided by merchants for their
out-of-town friends and customers. No one was in sight. No doubt the
drivers of those wagons were scattered about the town "seeing the
elephant and hearing the owl." In their haste to become patrons of the
town's dispensaries of mirth and good cheer the last ones to depart
must have left the great wooden gate swinging open.

Curly had satisfied the hunger of an anaconda and the thirst of
a camel, so he was neither in the mood nor the condition of an
explorer. He zigzagged his way to the first wagon that his eyesight
distinguished in the semi-darkness under the shed. It was a two-horse
wagon with a top of white canvas. The wagon was half filled with loose
piles of wool sacks, two or three great bundles of grey blankets, and
a number of bales, bundles, and boxes. A reasoning eye would have
estimated the load at once as ranch supplies, bound on the morrow for
some outlying hacienda. But to the drowsy intelligence of Curly they
represented only warmth and softness and protection against the cold
humidity of the night. After several unlucky efforts, at last he
conquered gravity so far as to climb over a wheel and pitch forward
upon the best and warmest bed he had fallen upon in many a day. Then
he became instinctively a burrowing animal, and dug his way like a
prairie-dog down among the sacks and blankets, hiding himself from the
cold air as snug and safe as a bear in his den. For three nights sleep
had visited Curly only in broken and shivering doses. So now, when
Morpheus condescended to pay him a call, Curly got such a strangle
hold on the mythological old gentleman that it was a wonder that
anyone else in the whole world got a wink of sleep that night.

Six cowpunchers of the Cibolo Ranch were waiting around the door of
the ranch store. Their ponies cropped grass near by, tied in the Texas
fashion