"I decided to watch him," the ranchman told me, "and see if he would play up to his big talk. When we left our ponies, half a mile from the camp, I pretended to argue with 'Cap' White, told him he ought to leave young Thomas with the horses and not get such a boy as that all shot up. 'Cap' caught my point and begged him to stay, but, of course, he wouldn't hear of it. 'I'll stick to Brunner,' says he. "'All right,' says I, 'come on.' "When we started afoot, we trailed out single file, and I noticed that old man Thomas waited for the boy and me to pass him, dropping in right behind his son. 'Cap' was in front, then Bruce, then Paden Tolbert, then Ryder and Kelso, and then I and the Thomases. The old man was at the tail of the procession. "Old man Thomas was the kind that you never think about one way or the other. You said to yourself that he would do his share, whatever it amounted to, and you wouldn't have to bother about him. That's your notion of him, ain't it?" It _was_ my notion of the older Thomas. I don't think a more commonplace looking man ever lived. Brunner told me that he had not changed in fourteen years. "'Young Henry swells around and talks big; the old man he says nothing and chaws tobacco,' That's the way people size 'em up around here." Brunner thus confirmed my own impression of the pair. "What a man can see out of the back of his head," Brunner went on, "is a lot different from what comes in front of his eyes. He feels a lot that don't make a sound and that ain't visible. I did see, out of the corner of my eye, that young Henry Thomas was dropping behind me little by little, but I didn't see why it was he moved up again. I know why, though. The old man had ordered him up--not in words, you understand, for I could have heard a whisper in the still dawn, the way we were snaking it over the trail. From that time on, every foot of the way, the old man drove the boy. You ask me how, and I can't tell you. There wasn't a word, not a motion that I could see, but all the time it was one man driving the other as plain as could be. And it wasn't easy. I felt that young Henry was worse than balky, that he would have broke through the bushes and run off screaming if that old man had taken his eyes off of him for ten seconds. "A quarter of a mile it was, and we went slow--twenty feet forward picking our way, then the eight of us would stop to listen. If you ever get a chance, ask young Henry how long that trail was. If he don't stop to think, he'll tell you we crawled through the bushes for five miles, but if he remembers his part as the hero of the fight, he'll say, 'Oh, we sneaked a hundred yards or so before lighting into Queen's bunch.'"