“Wall,” the drawly tongue started off, “I’ll tell you about something that happened to me. One morning I was a-leaving the ranch to look out for wormy calves. I was going to be gone all day, and jest as I throwed my leg over the saddle, a Meskin girl that lived with her people in a jacal close to the corral came a-running out. ‘Here,’ says she, ‘we’ve jest been making tamales out of the cow that got her leg broke yesterday and you all had to kill. The meat is fat and the corn is new, and the tamales are _muy sabroso_. You must take some of them with you.’ “Now I would do nearly anything this little Meskin girl suggested. So I told her all right, to wrop the tamales up in some paper and a flour sack and I’d put ’em in my morral with the hank of dried beef and the bottle of worm medicine. Which she did. Tamales ain’t much good unless they are hot, you know, and I figgered the wropping would keep these warm. “Well, after I’d gone about six miles, I struck a bull that I decided to rope. Which I did. The bull he kept on going after he hit the end of the rope and my horse he could not stop him. He dragged me about forty miles more or less, I guess, before I hung up in a mesquite tree with my chin between the forks of a limb. I don’t know how long I hung there, but it was some time. People differ as to how long it was. Anyway, it was until the limb rotted down and I dropped to the ground. “I didn’t want to go back to the ranch afoot, and so I hit out follering the horse’s tracks. I found him a good piece out looking purty gant but still saddled and the rope that had rotted off the bull’s neck still tied to the horn of the saddle. I went right up to the morral, for it was still on the saddle, and untied it. I was a little gant myself. Then I felt of the sacking around the tamales, and I couldn’t feel no heat. Says I to myself, ‘I bet that Meskin girl didn’t wrop ’em right and the danged things have got so cold they won’t be no count to eat.’ But I went on and unwropped the paper, and when I got to the shucks, danged if they didn’t burn my fingers. Them tamales shore tasted good after all that bull running and then hoofing it after the horse. It is remarkable the way tamales hold the heat when they are well wropped.”