[Illustration: “_Well, sir, them birds jist naturally lifted me right out of that sink-hole._”] “Well, sir, them birds jist naturally lifted me right out of that sink-hole.” “You were lucky,” said Lanky. “Lucky! Lad, that wasn’t luck; that was head work. You ain’t heard about my luck yet. Them buzzards begun flyin’ away with me, but I seen what direction they was goin’, and I jist let ’em alone and watched the lay of the land. And when they had me right over a big hay-stack at the headquarters of my own outfit, I reached down and unbuckled my belt, and damn me, if I didn’t land right on the hay without any hurtin’ a-tall. “I walked up to the house and had a square meal--and I et, too, I’ll tell you--and then I felt as fresh and pert as ever.” “That was a lucky landing,” said Lanky. “It shore was,” said Red. “I got off light. The worst thing about it was that them vultures carried off my belt; and a cracker-jack it was, too, trimmed with rattlesnake hide and gold studs. Twenty-eight dollars and fifty cents it cost me over the counter at K. C., Misourey.” Lanky expected Joe to tell the next story, but the veteran smoked placidly, and graciously surrendered his turn to Hank. “A thing like that nearly happened to me once,” said Hank, “except it was a canyon instead of a sink hole. “I ought to of had more sense than to ride a fool bronc like the critter I was on around a place like that, but I was green in them days. You see I was ridin’ around a rimrock, lookin’ out for steers in the canyon down below, and down below it was, shore-nuff--five hundred feet straight down--jest as straight as a wall. “Well, I’d rode along that way for a while, when suddenly I took a fool notion to smoke. So I rolled me a fat _tamale_, and pulled out a match and struck it on my saddle-horn. “Jest then that fool bronc bogged his head and begun pitchin’ and bawlin’ like six-bits, and the next thing I knowed he’d fell off that rim-rock. And it was five hundred feet to the bottom if it was an inch. When that hoss hit the bottom, he jest naturally spattered all over the scenery.” “And you?” asked Lanky. “Well, you see,” said Hank, “when we went off that rim-rock together, I knowed that that saddle that I had been tryin’ so hard to stay in was no place for me then; so I got off; and I had to be damn quick about it, too. I wasn’t much more than off the brute when he hit the bottom.” Lanky expected Joe to send him off to bed. There were cattle to gather during the day and to hold at night until all the pastures should be worked, and it was Joe who usually reminded the unseasoned boy that sleep was necessary, even if Lanky preferred the romancing of the older hands. But Joe merely chunked up the fire. “That puts me in mind,” said he, “of a hunt I went on once in the Guadalupe Mountains. You see, we was out after big-horn sheep--used to be lots of ’em up there, but they are ’bout all gone now. Few up in the mountains where the tin-horn hunters never go.