The drooped lids raised; brown eyes looked steadily into brown eyes. "I didn't want to wake up," he said. The candor of this explanation threw her, for the moment, into a vivid and becoming confusion. The dusky roses leaped to her cheeks; the long, dark lashes quivered and fell. Then she rose to the occasion. "And how about the little eohippus?" she demanded. "That doesn't seem to go well with some of your other talk." "Oh!" He regarded her with pained but unflinching innocence. "The Latin, you mean? Why, ma'am, that's most all the Latin I know--that and some more big words in that song. I learned that song off of Frank John, just like a poll-parrot." "Sing it! And eohippus isn't Latin. It's Greek." "Why, ma'am, I can't, just now--I'm so muddy; but I'll tell it to you. Maybe I'll sing it to you some other time." A sidelong glance accompanied this little suggestion. The girl's face was blank and non-committal; so he resumed: "It goes like this: "Said the little Eohippus, 'I'm going to be a horse, And on my middle fingernails To run my earthly course'---- "No; that wasn't the first. It begins: "There was once a little animal No bigger than a fox, And on five toes he scampered---- "Of course you know, ma'am--Frank John he told me about it--that horses were little like that, 'way back. And this one he set his silly head that he was going to be a really-truly horse, like the song says. And folks told him he couldn't--couldn't possibly be done, nohow. And sure enough he did. It's a foolish song, really. I only sing parts of it when I feel like that--like it couldn't be done and I was going to do it, you know. The boys call it my song. Look here, ma'am!" He fished in his vest pocket and produced tobacco and papers, matches--last of all, a tiny turquoise horse, an inch long. "I had a jeweler-man put five toes on his feet once to make him be a little eohippus. Going to make a watch-charm of him sometime. He's a lucky little eohippus, I think. Peso gave him to me when--never mind when. Peso's a Mescalero Indian, you know, chief of police at the agency." He gingerly dropped the little horse into her eager palm. It was a singularly grotesque and angular little beast, high-stepping, high-headed, with a level stare, at once complacent and haughty. Despite the first unprepossessing rigidity of outline, there was somehow a sprightly air, something endearing, in the stiff, purposed stride, the alert, inquiring ears, the stern and watchful eye. Each tiny hoof was faintly graven to semblance of five tinier toes; there, the work showed fresh.