"He drives like a Missourian," he muttered.
He could have helped the troubled driver, knowing perfectly well what to do, but it would have entailed an effort which he did not care to make. It was nothing to him whether the round-up wagon got up the hill that night--or never.
Smith thought the driver was alone until he began to back the team to rush the hill once more. Then he heard angry exclamations coming from the rear of the wagon--exclamations which sounded not unlike the buzzing of an enraged bumble-bee. He stretched his neck and saw that which suggested an overgrown hoop-snake rolling down the hill. At the bottom a little mud-coated man stood up. The part of his face that was visible above his beard was pale with anger. His brown eyes gleamed behind mud-splashed spectacles.
"Oscar Tubbs," he demanded, "why did you not tell me that you were about to back the wagon?"
"I would have did it if I had knowed myself that the team were goin' to back," replied Tubbs, in the conciliatory tone of one who addresses the man who pays him his wages.
The man in spectacles groaned. "Three inexcusable errors in one sentence. Oscar Tubbs, you are hopeless!"
"Yep," replied that person resignedly; "nobody never could learn me nothin'. Onct I knowed----"
"Stop! We have no time for a reminiscence. Have you any reason to believe that we can get up this hill to-night?"
"No chanst of it. These buzzard-heads has drawed every poun' they kin pull. But I has some reason to believe that if you don't hist your hoofs out'n that mud-hole, you'll bog down. You're up to your pant-leg now. Onct I knowed----"
The little man threw out his hand in a restraining gesture, and Tubbs, foiled again, closed his lips and watched his employer stand back on one leg while he pulled the other out of the mud with a long, sucking sound.
"What for an outfit is that, anyhow?" mused Smith, watching the proceedings with some interest. "He looks like one of them bug-hunters. He's got a pair of shoulders on him like a drink of water, and his legs look like the runnin'-gears of a katydid."
So intently were they all engaged in watching the man's struggles that no one observed a girl on a galloping horse until she was almost upon them. She sat her sturdy, spirited pony like a cowboy. She was about sixteen, with a suggestion of boyishness in her appearance. Her brown hair, worn in a single braid, was bleached to a lighter shade on top, as if she rode always with bared head. Her eyes were gray, in curious contrast to a tawny skin. She was slight to scrawniness, and, one might have thought, insufficiently clad for the time of year.