startled rabbit.

"Well, what's eating you?" Andy demanded querulously, and pushed past
him into the room.

Not all of the Happy Family were there. Cal, Jack Bates, Irish and
Happy Jack had gone into the Bad Lands next to the river; but there were
enough left to make the soul of Andy quiver forebodingly, and to send
the flush of extreme humiliation to his cheeks.

The Happy Family looked at him in stunned surprise; then they glanced at
one another in swift, wordless inquiry, grinned wisely and warily, and
went on with their dinner. At least they pretended to go on with
their dinner, while Andy glared at them with amazed reproach in his
misleadingly honest gray eyes.

"When you've got plenty of time," he said at last in a choked tone,
"maybe one of you obliging cusses will untie this damned rope."

"Why, sure!" Pink threw a leg over the bench and got up with cheerful
alacrity. "I'll do it now, if you say so; I didn't know but what that
was some new fad of yours, like--"

"Fad!" Andy repeated the word like an explosion.

"Well, by golly, Andy needn't think I'm goin' to foller that there
style," Slim stated solemnly. "I need m' rope for something else than to
tie n' clothes on with."

"I sure do hate to see a man wear funny things just to make himself
conspicuous," Pink observed, while he fumbled at the knot, which was
intricate. Andy jerked away from him that he might face him ragefully.

"Maybe this looks funny to you," he cried, husky with wrath. "But I
can't seem to see the joke, myself. I admit I let then herders make
a monkey of me.... They slipped up behind, going down into Antelope
coulee, and slid down the bluff onto me; and, before I could get up,
they got me tied, all right. I licked one of 'en before that, and
thought I had 'en gentled down--"

Andy stopped short, silenced by that unexplainable sense which warns us
when our words are received with cold disbelief.

"Mh-hm--I thought maybe you'd run up against a hostile jackrabbit, or
something," Pink purred, and went back to his place on the bench.

"Haw-haw-haw-w-w!" came Big Medicine's tardy bellow. "That's more
reasonable than the sheepherder story, by cripes!"

Andy looked at them much as he had stared up at the sky before he began
to swear--speechlessly, with a trembling of the muscles around his
mouth. He was quite white, considering how tanned he was, and his
forehead was shiny, with beads of perspiration standing thickly upon it.

"Weary