"Now lookee here, Bud," clamored Phil, who had had a few drinks already, "you don't mean to insinuate, do you? Next thing I know you'll be asking me to cut it out on the hay--might talk in my sleep, you know, and give the whole snap away!" "No, you're a good boy when you're asleep, Phil," responded Bud, "but when you get about half shot it's different. Come on, now--I'll quit if you will. That's fair, ain't it?" "What? No little toots around town? No serenading the _señoritas_ and giving the _rurales_ the hotfoot? Well, what's the use of living, Bud, if you can't have a little fun? Drinking don't make any difference, as long as we stick together. What's the use of swearing off--going on record in advance? We may find some fellow that we can't work any other way--we may have to go on a drunk with him in order to get his goat. But will you stick? That's the point!" Bud glanced at him and grunted, and for a long time he rode on in silence. Before them lay a rolling plain, dipping by broad gulches and dwindling ridges to the lower levels of Old Mexico, and on the sky-line, thin and blue, stood the knifelike edges of the Fortunas miles away. With desert-trained eyes he noted the landmarks, San Juan mountain to the right, Old Niggerhead to the left, and the feather-edge of mountains far below; and as he looked he stored it away in his mind in case he should come back on the run some night. It was not a foreboding, but the training of his kind, to note the lay of the ground, and he planned just where he would ride to keep under cover if he ever made a dash for the line. But all the time his pardner was talking of friendship and of the necessity of their sticking together. "I'll tell you, Bud," he said at last, his voice trembling with sentiment, "whether we win or lose, I won't have a single regret as long as I know we've been true to one another. You may know Texas and Arizona, Bud, but I know Old Mexico, the land of _mañana_ and broken promises. I know the country, Bud--and the climate--and the women! "They play the devil with the best of us, Bud, these dark-eyed _señoritas_! That's what makes all the trouble down here between man and man, it's these women and their ways. They're not satisfied to win a man's heart--they want him to kill somebody to show that he really loves them. By Jove! they're a fickle lot, and nothing pleases 'em more than setting man against man, one pardner against another." "We never had no trouble yet," observed Bud sententiously. "No, but we're likely to," protested De Lancey. "Those Indian women up in the Sierras wouldn't turn anybody's head, but we're going down into the hot country now, where the girls are pretty, ta-ra, ta-ra, and we talk through the windows at midnight." "Well, if you'll cut out the booze," said Hooker shortly, "you can have 'em all, for all of me."