“Yes.  It’s getting hot on the plains.”

“Got in just before daylight, then?”

“Just before.  I’d have made it sooner, but I had to work my way through the cattle.”

“Where’s your team?”

“I left it down at the Company’s stables; thought you wouldn’t mind.”

“Sure not,” said Bob.

The Company’s stables were at the other end of the village.  Oldham must have walked the length of the street.  He had said it was before daylight; but the look of the man’s eyes was quizzical and cold behind the glasses.  Still, it was always quizzical and cold.  Bob called himself a panicky fool.  Just the same, he wished now he had looked for footprints in the dust of the street.  While his brain was thus busy with swift conjecture and the weighing of probabilities, his tongue was making random conversation, and his vacant eye was taking in and reporting to his intelligence the most trivial things.  Generally speaking, his intelligence did not catch the significance of what his eyes reported until after an appreciable interval.  Thus he noted that Oldham had smoked his cigar down to a short butt.  This unimportant fact meant nothing, until his belated mind told him that never before had he seen the man actually smoking.  Oldham always held a cigar between his lips, but he contented himself with merely chewing it or rolling it about.  And this was very early, before breakfast.

“Never saw you smoke before,” he remarked abruptly, as this bubble of irrelevant thought came to the surface.

“No?” said Oldham, politely.

“It would make me woozy all day to smoke before I ate,” said Bob, his voice trailing away, as his inner ear once more took up its listening for the hubbub that must soon break.

As the moments went by, the suspense of this waiting became almost unbearable.  A small portion of him kept up its semblance of conversation with Oldham; another small portion of him made minute and careful notes of trivial things; all the rest of him, body and soul, was listening, in the hope that soon, very soon, a scream would break the suspense.  From time to time he felt that Oldham was looking at him queerly, and he rallied his faculties to the task of seeming natural.

“Aren’t you feeling well?” asked the older man at last.  “You’re mighty pale.  You want to watch out where you drink water around some of these places.”

Bob came to with a snap.

“Didn’t sleep well,” said he, once more himself.

“Well, that wouldn’t trouble me,” yawned Oldham; “if it hadn’t been for cigars I’d have dropped asleep in this chair an hour ago.  You said you couldn’t smoke before breakfast; neither can I ordinarily.  This isn’t before breakfast for me, it’s after supper; and I’ve smoked two just to keep awake.”

“Why keep awake?” asked Bob.

“When I pass away, it’ll be for all day.  I want to eat first.”

There, at last, it had come!  A man down the street shouted.  There followed a pounding at doors, and then the murmur of exclamations, questions and replies.