A few hours sufficed for the boy to purchase some trifles needed to make up his equipment, and bright and early the following morning he started for Aragon, where he would find out the location of the party he was to join. It was quite dull after the jollity and interest of the trip to El Paso, and Roger began to wish that he had arrived, and was pining to get into action again. But the incident for which he was anxious did not fail him. As the train pulled up at Chispa, a station about fifty miles west of Aragon, it was seen that almost the whole population of the village was at the depot, a crowd numbering perhaps twenty people, and foremost among them a man carrying a little girl, about eight years old, in his arms. In answer to questions put to him in Spanish, for he could speak no English, the father explained his trouble by pointing to six little marks on the girl's leg, three groups of two, all near each other. No sooner was it seen what the trouble was than a big six-footer shouldered his way through the car. "When?" he asked. In a torrent of Spanish and gesticulation, the man explained that the child had been struck by a rattlesnake three times, fortunately, a small one, just half an hour before the train came in, and that he was going to take her to the nearest doctor, who was in Marfa, a town some few stations down the line. "Well," said the big man, "I can fix her, I guess. That is, I've got the regular serum here, but I haven't a syringe. Any gentleman got a hypodermic needle?" But none of the passengers would confess to the use of a needle, because of its implication that its owner would be a "dope fiend," and the querist shrugged his shoulders. "Are you a doctor?" asked one of the men in the car. "I'm not a little girl doctor, I'm a cattle doctor," answered the big man with a laugh, "or at least I'm a government inspector, and I haven't anything smaller than this!" He pulled out of his case a hypodermic syringe used for injecting fluid into cattle. But the father sent up a cry of protest at the sight of the instrument, and would not allow it to be used. The matter was explained to him in Spanish, in English, and in half a dozen different dialects of each, but he only shook his head. "Has anybody got a sharp knife? I mean really sharp," next asked the inspector, who had assumed control of the situation and was in no wise disconcerted by the opposition of the girl's father. There was a moment's pause and then Roger stepped forward. "I was taught on the Survey," he emphasized the words to give them weight with the government official, "to keep a blade sharp, and I guess this is about as good steel as you can get." The inspector took it, opened it, and ran his thumb along the blade. "It's a good knife, son," he said, "but it's no surgical instrument. Some one lend me a razor, I use a safety myself."