is
helpless lad, left in his hut by White Feather, his Ute brother-in-law.
If Moon Face were living, the Ute maiden who had been his wife and
little Jose's mother, it wouldn't have mattered. To her would have
fallen the care. Nothing had gone right with him, Alaric, the sheep
herder, since Moon Face fell ill and died, though he went often to that
far place in the forest where her body had been secretly buried in the
crevice of a great rock. Moon Face had left him for a few days' visit to
a camp of her relatives and there had taken the small-pox and died,
despite the fact that she had been treated by the wisest medicine men
and immersed in the sweat-box, the Indian cure for all ills. If he had
been near enough to such a thing, or had had energy enough to prepare it
up here at his home, Alaric would promptly have subjected poor Jim to
similar treatment.

As it was, the isolation of Alaric's hut and his laziness saved the
wanderer from this. Now, as he obeyed the boy's summons, he was brooding
over his misfortunes and was more grim even than usual.

"Well, young man?"

Jim was surprised. The man had been so silent, hitherto, that he
imagined they two had no language in common.

"So you speak English! That makes it easy. I want to send a message to
the place I--I left. Will you take it?"

Alaric shook his head, firmly declining.

"Don't get ugly. If you won't go, will you send somebody?"

The Mexican pretended that his English did not go so far as this. He
obstinately would not understand.

Then followed a long argument which greatly wearied Jim and simply
failed of its object. At last, he named "San Leon" and Alaric's
expression brightened. That was the place where there was plenty of
money and the sheep herder loved money. He had been there. It was not
far away, by a road he knew, yet he did not care to go there again,
himself. There had been a transaction of horses that wasn't pleasant to
remember. Old Lem Hunt had accused him of being a thief, once on a
time, when some thoroughbreds had been missing from the San Leon
corrals, and Alaric had had hard work to prove his innocence. He had
been obliged to prove it because, in Colorado, men were still sometimes
inclined to take justice in their own hands and not wait for the law to
do it for them.

The truth was that the sheep herder had not, personally, taken a single
steed from San Leon. He had merely "assisted" some of his Indian friends
to do so. He had even c