“Are you hurt bad?” asked the Dean.

That brought him to his senses, and he got to his feet somewhat unsteadily, and began brushing the dust from his clothes.  Then he looked curiously toward the horse that Curly was holding down by the simple means of sitting on the animal’s head.  “I certainly thought my legs were long enough to reach around him,” he said reflectively.  “How in the world did he manage it?  I seemed to be falling for a week.”

Phil yelled and the Dean laughed until the tears ran down his red cheeks, while Bob and Curly went wild.

Patches went to the horse, and gravely walked around him.  Then, “Let him up,” he said to Curly.

The cowboy looked at Phil, who nodded.

As the bay regained his feet, Patches started toward him.

“Here,” said the Dean peremptorily.  “You come away from there.”

“I’m going to see if he can do it again,” declared Patches grimly.

“Not to-day, you ain’t,” returned the Dean.  “You’re workin’ for me now, an’ you’re too good a man to be killed tryin’ any more crazy experiments.”

At the Dean’s words the look of gratitude in the man’s eyes was almost pathetic.

“I wonder if I am,” he said, so low that only the Dean and Phil heard.

“If you are what?” asked the Dean, puzzled by his manner.

“Worth anything—­as a man—­you know,” came the strange reply.

The Dean chuckled.  “You’ll be all right when you get your growth.  Come on over here now, out of the way, while Phil takes some of the cussedness out of that fool horse.”

Together they watched Phil ride the bay and return him to his mates a very tired and a much wiser pupil.  Then, while Patches remained to watch further operations in the corral, the Dean went to the house to tell Stella all about it.

“And what do you think he really is?” she asked, as the last of a long list of questions and comments.

The Dean shook his head.  “There’s no tellin’.  A man like that is liable to be anything.”  Then he added, with his usual philosophy:  “He acts, though, like a genuine thoroughbred that’s been badly mishandled an’ has just found it out.”

When the day’s work was finished and supper was over Little Billy found Patches where he stood looking across the valley toward Granite Mountain that loomed so boldly against the soft light of the evening sky.  The man greeted the boy awkwardly, as though unaccustomed to children.  But Little Billy, very much at ease, signified his readiness to help the stranger to an intimate acquaintance with the world of which he knew so much more than this big man.

He began with no waste of time on mere preliminaries.

“See that mountain over there?  That’s Granite Mountain.  There’s wild horses live around there, an’ sometimes we catch ’em.  Bet you don’t know that Phil’s name is ’Wild Horse Phil’.”

Patches smiled.  “That’s a good name for him, isn’t it?”