“I’ve heard,” said the bank cashier, Bradley, who was putting in his first winter snowbound in the Rockies, “that a mule is the most sure-footed animal on a narrow, steep trail, and I expect that would be doubly true on a slippery, icy one. We had best acquire a reliable mule for this man McKay!” “Second that motion,” said Art Robinson, the teller. “We don’t want that dough in the bottom of a ravine somewheres so that we’ll have to go out and dig for it. Get him a mule.” “A mule,” said President Warren, in the judicious tones he took pains to cultivate as Monte Vista’s banker, “is just the thing for that man McKay--slow and sure, safe and sound!” The president, it seemed, remembered McKay, and if memory was not at fault McKay was too speedy a rider for any good. So when Shorty, informed of his election by Sheriff Cook, reported at the bank, they told him, gently, that he must go on a mule, so that the money would be sure to arrive on schedule. “Mule!” whooped Shorty. “Not on yuhr tintype! No mule for me while I’m conscious! I’ll ride Lobo Loco, the smartest cow hoss in the San Luis. He can hang on by his lip, if necessary. No mule, gents, no mule--mules are for fools, thass all--for crazy prospectors, mebbe, but not for me!” “Why,” spoke up President Warren, “that bandit and outlaw--curse him--that man Bancroft rides a big white mule, they tell me, and he should know what he’s doing.” “What!” roared Shorty, “an’ yuh want me to go wormin’ up through the snow past them lonely cabins an’ lonesome ranches, where the inmates are just waitin’ for a chance to crack down with a rifle on somebody just for diversion, an’ me whalin’ a mule along so they’ll think I am that Bancroft feller an’ try to keep me from freezin’ with some hot lead?” “My point,” said the president patiently, “was this: If a mule is safe for Bancroft, a robber, to ride through the winter wilderness, would a mule not be safe for you, too?” “It would not,” said Shorty decisively. “I want to be back here before Easter. Why, I’d get so impatient after the first mile I’d git off an’ begin carryin’ the mule and then them hillbillies would think I was plumb nuts!” So, of course, Shorty had his way. And when he departed, with the pay roll, all in currency, in a leather case slung on a strap around his neck, he rode Lobo Loco, and he went out of town on a dead run, with the pony’s breath visible on the sharp air like steam from a locomotive. Shorty had elected to leave at once, although it was late in the day. In that matter, too, he had overruled the pleas of the banker, silencing opposition by saying it was safer at night, on a winter trail, than in the day, when, if there was a bandit within a hundred miles he’d be expecting a payroll messenger far more than he would in the depths of a cold night.