“Well, I seen there wasn’t nothin’ I could do but wait for daylight and then try to figure out some way to git out; so I jist laid down and took a nap till mornin’. “When daylight come, I got up and looked around, but the walls was straight up and down, and there wasn’t nothin’ I could git a-holt of to climb out. Then I took the rope off my saddle and begun to look for somethin’ twenty feet or so up that I could rope, thinkin’ I could pull myself up that far, and then maybe rope somethin’ else a little higher up, and pull myself up again, and so on till I was out. “But there wasn’t a thing, Lanky, not a bush nor a rock, nor nothin’ stickin’ out I could git a loop on. Everything as slick as glass. ‘Well, maybe the boys will come and hunt me,’ I thinks, ‘but how in the hell will they know to look down in here?’ “I waited all day, and not a soul come: and I waited all the next day, and still nobody come. The third day I was still there and no better off than I was in the beginnin’. “By that time I was wishin’ I was dead, for I had drunk up all the water in my saddle canteen, and I was gittin’ hungry, too.” “Couldn’t you have eaten some of the horse meat?” asked Lanky. “Yes, I guess I could of,” said Red, “but at first I wouldn’t out of friendship for the brute--for even if he did git me in there, I always figgered there was somethin’ wrong; he went out of his head or somethin’--and after I got hungry enough to of et him, anyway, his carcass had spoiled and was stinkin’ somethin’ terrible. That’s principally what made it so bad. Every breath I drawed was misery. “Finally I says, ‘Red, you can’t stand this no longer. You’d shoot a pore dumb brute if you saw him in torment like this.’ And so I cocks my six-shooter and holds it to my head, but somehow I can’t pull the trigger. ‘Stand it a little while longer,’ I says to myself, ‘and if help don’t come, shoot.’ I done that three or four times, I guess. “After a while buzzards begun flyin’ over the hole--dozens of ’em sailin’ round and round. They knowed there was somethin’ dead somewheres around, but they was havin’ trouble locatin’ it. They kept comin’ lower and lower, till directly one comes down into the sink-hole. Then some more come, and they would fly right down close to me. ‘I reckon you come after Frijole,’ I says, ‘but jist wait a little while and you can have me too.’ “And jist then I had an idear. I picks up my lariat right quiet-like and begins unravelin’ it into little strands. In each little strand I tied a noose. Then I takes my seat by the side of the carcass and jist waits. Directly a big turkey buzzard comes right down close, and I throws a loop over his head and fetches him down. Then I stakes him to my belt, givin’ him about six foot of rope. After a while I gits another one. I keeps on until I gits twenty of the vultures staked to my belt; then I fires off my six-shooter, scerin’ ’em all at once.