The earth had dried, the plenteous stars were bright in the sky, we needed no tent over us, and merely spread my rubber blanket and the buffalo robes, and so beneath light covers waited for sleep to the gurgle, sluggish and musical, of Broke Axle. Scipio’s sleep was superior to mine, coming sooner and burying him deeper from the world of wakefulness. Thus he did not become aware of a figure sitting by our little fire of embers, whose presence penetrated my thinner sleep until my eyes opened and saw it. Such things give me a shock, which, I suppose, must be fear, but it is not at all fear of the mind. I lay still, drawing my gun stealthily into a good position and thinking what were best to do; but he must have heard me. “Lemme me show you sheep.” “What’s that?” It was Scipio starting to life and action. “Don’t shoot Timberline,” I said. “He’s come to show us sheep.” Scipio sat staring stupefied at the figure by the embers, and then he slowly turned his head round to me, and I thought he was going to pour out one of those long, corrosive streams of comment that usually burst from him when he was enough surprised. But he was too much surprised. “His name is Henry Hall,” he said to me very mildly. “I’ve just remembered it.” The patient figure by the embers rose. “There’s sheep in the Washakie Needles. Lots and lots and lots. I seen ’em myself in the spring. I can take you right to ’em. Don’t make me go back and be stock-tender.” He recited all this in a sort of rising wail until the last sentence, in which the entreaty shook his voice. “Washakie Needles is the nearest likely place,” muttered Scipio. “If you don’t get any, you needn’t to pay me any,” urged the boy; and he stretched out an arm to mark his words and his prayer. We sat in our beds and he stood waiting by the embers to hear his fate, while nothing made a sound but Broke Axle. “Why not?” I said. “We were talking of a third man.” “A man,” said Scipio. “Yes.” “I can cook, I can pack, I can cook good bread, and I can show you sheep, and if I don’t you needn’t to pay me a cent,” entreated the boy. “He sure means what he says,” Scipio commented. “It’s your trip.” Thus it was I came to hire Timberline. Dawn showed him in the same miserable rags he wore on my first sight of him at the corral, and these proved his sole visible property of any kind; he didn’t possess a change of anything, he hadn’t brought away from Rongis so much as a handkerchief tied up with things inside it; most wonderful of all, he owned not even a horse--and in that country in those days five dollars’ worth of horse was within the means of almost anybody. But he was not unclean, as I had feared. He washed his one set of rags, and his skin-and-bones body, by the light of the first sunrise on Broke Axle, and this proved a not too rare habit with him, which made all the more strange his neglect to throw the rags away and wear the new clothes I bought and gave him as we passed through Lander.