d again and carefully
examined the bruised forefoot.

"A moon and a half he'll go lame. Yes. For just so long let him be left
with Pedro. Si?"

Then he led the limping beast toward the hut and began to bathe its
injured ankle with the water from the tub.

"Marvelous! I never saw anything done as easily as that!" cried Mr.
Hale, recovering from his astonishment.

"Ah; but you've never seen our Pedro before. And to think I was so
angry with him, I!"

With a remorseful impulse Jessica sprang forward and threw her arms about
the old shepherd's shoulders. He received her caress as calmly as he
did everything else, though a keen observer might have seen a fleeting
smile around his rugged lips.

Smiles did, indeed, spring to all three faces when, a moment later, the
rattling of tins discovered Zulu rummaging a heap of empty cans, even
in the very act of swallowing a highly decorated one.

The jingling startled Prince, also, from the repose into which he had
now settled, and, after one terrified glance toward his unknown enemy,
King Zu, he dashed across the mesa as if lameness were unknown.

At which Pedro smiled, well content.

"Good. He that uses his own legs spares his neighbors. Yes."

"Meaning that he would have to be exercised by somebody?"

The shepherd did not answer. He had lived alone so long amid the great
solitudes of nature that speech had grown irksome to him. He regarded
it a sin to waste words, and his young mistress understood this, if Mr.
Hale did not. To this gentleman the situation presented itself as a very
serious one. There was no habitation visible save the small hut, a place
barely sufficient to its owner's simple needs and utterly inadequate
to those of a lately recovered invalid. He was not strong enough to
make his way to the valley on foot, and even if Prince were now able to
carry him, he felt it would be brutal to impose so hard a task.

But Jessica came to his aid with the suggestion:

"If you'll come and rest behind the cabin I'll make you a cup of
coffee on Pedro's little stove. He often lets me when I come up to see
him, and then, when you've rested, we'll go home. I am so angry I
can hardly breathe."

"Indeed; I should never have guessed it," he answered, laughing, and
allowing the girl to lead him to the shelter proposed.

"Ah! but I am. And a gentlewoman never gets angry. Least of all with
such a darling as Pedro. You see, he ought to have been about dying, and
he hasn't