s and deep-scarred
hills, they heard a faint halloo. With spurs pricking deep and
frequent they hurried to the spot; looked down a grassy swale and saw
Andy lying full length upon the ground in rather a peculiar pose,
while his horse fed calmly a rein-length away.

They stopped and looked at him, and at each other; rode cautiously to
within easy rifle shot and stopped again.

"Ain't yuh getting tired feelings kinda unseasonable in the day?" Jack
Bates called out guardedly.

"I--I'm hurt, boys," Andy lifted his head to say, strainedly. "My hoss
stepped in a hole, and I wasn't looking for it. I guess--my leg's
broke."

Jack snorted. "That so? Sure it ain't your neck, now? Seems to me your
head sets kinda crooked. Better feel it and find out, while we go on
where we're going." He half turned his horse up the hill again,
resenting the impulse which had betrayed him a hand's breadth from the
trail.

Andy waited a moment. Then: "On the dead, boys, my leg's broke--like
you'd bust a dry stick. Come and see--for yourselves."

"Maybe--" Irish began, uncertainly, in an undertone. Andy's voice had
in it a note of pain that was rather convincing.

"Aw, he's just trying to head us off. Didn't I help pack him up that
ungodly bluff, last spring, thinking he was going to die before we got
him to the top--and him riding off and giving us the horse-laugh to
pay for it? You can bite, if yuh want to; I'm going on. I sure savvy
Andy Green."

"Come and look," Andy begged from below. "If I'm joshing--"

"You can josh and be darned," finished Jack for him. "I don't pack you
up hill more than once, old-timer. We're going to call on your
Mary-girl. When yuh get good and refreshed up, you can come and look
on at me and Irish acting pretty and getting a stand-in. So-long!"

Irish, looking back over his shoulder, saw Andy raise his head and
gaze after them; saw it drop upon his arms just before they went quite
over the hill. The sight stuck persistently and unpleasantly in his
memory.

"Yuh know, he _might_ be hurt," he began tentatively when they had
ridden slowly a hundred yards or so.

"He might. But he ain't. He's up to some game again, and he wouldn't
like anything better than to have us ride down there and feel his
bones. If you'd been along, that day in the Bad-lands, you'd know the
kind of bluff he can put up. Why, we all thought sure he was going to
die. He acted that natural we felt like we was packing a corpse at a
funera