Then he arose in a leisurely fashion and, carefully depositing his osiers in a tub of water, came forward. "So? He can't get up, yes? A wise man looks where he rides, indeed." Despite his anxiety over Prince, Mr. Hale regarded the shepherd with amused curiosity. Pedro's swarthy face was as unmoved as if the visits of strangers with disabled horses were daily events; but the man's calmness did not prevent his usefulness. In fact, during every step of his deliberate advance he had been studying the situation and how best to aid the fallen animal, which had now ceased to struggle and lay gazing at his master with a dumb, pitiful appeal. Then Pedro bent forward and, with a strength amazing in a man of his small build, seized Prince's head and shoulder and with one prodigious wrench freed him from the pitfall. Then he stooped 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: