“But the best way to make danger follow you, Jig, is to run away from it.  We stay put!”

He emphasized the remark by stretching luxuriously.  Gaspar, however, did not seem to hear the last words.  Something about the strange horseman had apparently riveted his interest.  His last gesture was arrested halfway, and his color changed perceptibly.

“You stay, then, Mr. Sinclair,” he said hurriedly.  “I’m going to slip down the hill and—­”

“You stay where you are!” cut in Sinclair.

“But I have a reason.”

“Your reasons ain’t no good.  You stay put.  You hear?”

It seemed that a torrent of explanation was about to pour from the lips of Jig, but he restrained himself, white of face, and sank down in the shade of the tree.  There he stretched himself out hastily, with his hands cupped behind his head and his hat tilted so far down over his face that his entire head was hidden.

Sinclair followed these proceedings with a lackluster eye.

“When you do move, Jig,” he said, “you ain’t so slow about it.  That’s pretty good faking, take it all in all.  But why don’t you want this strange gent to see your face?”

A slight shudder was the only reply; then Jig lay deadly still.  In the meantime, before Sinclair could pursue his questions, the horseman was almost upon them.  The cowpuncher regarded him with distinct approval.  He was a man of the country, and he showed it.  As his pony slouched down the slope, picking its way dexterously among the rocks, the rider met each jolt on the way with an easy swing of his shoulders, riding “straight up,” just enough of his weight falling into his stirrups to break the jar on the back of the mustang.

The stranger drew up on the trail and swung the head of his horse in toward the tree, raising his hand in cavalier greeting.  He was a sunbrowned fellow, as tall as Sinclair and more heavily built; as for his age, he seemed in that joyous prime of physical life, twenty-five.  Sinclair nodded amiably.

“Might that be Sour Creek yonder?” asked the brown man.

“It might be.  I reckon it is.  Get down and rest your hoss.”

“Thanks.  Maybe I will.”

He dropped to the ground and eased and stiffened his knees to get out the cramp of long riding.  Off the horse he seemed even bigger and more capable than before, and now that he had come sufficiently close, so that the shadow from his sombrero’s brim did not partially mask the upper part of his face, it seemed to Sinclair that about the eyes he was not nearly so prepossessing as around the clean-cut fighter’s mouth and chin.  The eyes were just a trifle too small, a trifle too close together.  Yet on the whole he was a handsome fellow, as he pushed back his hat and wiped his forehead dry with a gay silk handkerchief.

Sinclair noted, furthermore, that the other had a proper cowpuncher’s pride in his dress.  His bench-made boots molded his long and slender feet to a nicety and fitted like gloves around the high instep.  The polished spurs, with their spoon-handle curve, gleamed and flashed, as he stepped with a faint jingling.  The braid about his sombrero was a thing of price.  These details Sinclair noted.  The rest did not matter.