“When old McAllister was the cattle king of West Texas,” continued Baldy with Satanic sweetness, “you was some tallow. You had as much to say on the ranch as he did.” “I did,” admitted Webb, “up to the time he found out I was tryin’ to get my rope over Santa’s head. Then he kept me out on the range as far from the ranch-house as he could. When the old man died they commenced to call Santa the ‘cattle queen.’ I’m boss of the cattle—that’s all. She ’tends to all the business; she handles all the money; I can’t sell even a beef-steer to a party of campers, myself. Santa’s the ‘queen’; and I’m Mr. Nobody.” “I’d be king if I was you,” repeated Baldy Woods, the royalist. “When a man marries a queen he ought to grade up with her—on the hoof— dressed—dried—corned—any old way from the chaparral to the packing-house. Lots of folks thinks it’s funny, Webb, that you don’t have the say-so on the Nopalito. I ain’t reflectin’ none on Miz Yeager—she’s the finest little lady between the Rio Grande and next Christmas—but a man ought to be boss of his own camp.” The smooth, brown face of Yeager lengthened to a mask of wounded melancholy. With that expression, and his rumpled yellow hair and guileless blue eyes, he might have been likened to a schoolboy whose leadership had been usurped by a youngster of superior strength. But his active and sinewy seventy-two inches, and his girded revolvers forbade the comparison. “What was that you called me, Baldy?” he asked. “What kind of a concert was it?” “A ‘consort,’” corrected Baldy—“a ‘prince-consort.’ It’s a kind of short-card pseudonym. You come in sort of between Jack-high and a four-card flush.” Webb Yeager sighed, and gathered the strap of his Winchester scabbard from the floor. “I’m ridin’ back to the ranch to-day,” he said half-heartedly. “I’ve got to start a bunch of beeves for San Antone in the morning.” “I’m your company as far as Dry Lake,” announced Baldy. “I’ve got a round-up camp on the San Marcos cuttin’ out two-year-olds.” The two _compañeros_ mounted their ponies and trotted away from the little railroad settlement, where they had foregathered in the thirsty morning. At Dry Lake, where their routes diverged, they reined up for a parting cigarette. For miles they had ridden in silence save for the soft drum of the ponies’ hoofs on the matted mesquite grass, and the rattle of the chaparral against their wooden stirrups. But in Texas discourse is seldom continuous. You may fill in a mile, a meal, and a murder between your paragraphs without detriment to your thesis. So, without apology, Webb offered an addendum to the conversation that had begun ten miles away.