Skinny looked up into the honest blue eyes.
"You ain't sore at me or anything are you, Manilla?" he asked.
Hope sprung again into his heart. "I--I--thought maybe you would be," he stammered.
"Forget it!" she laughed. "The old world still wobbles!"
"Manilla, you--you're a peach!" he cried.
She chuckled. "Did you hear about that dance next Saturday night after the picture show?" she asked archly.
"No. Is there one?" with new interest in life.
"Yes," she replied, her lashes drooping demurely; "they say the music is going to be swell."
"If I come in will you--will we--go, Manilla?" he asked eagerly.
"Poor Skinny," Manilla murmured to herself as she went to the kitchen to get his order, "poor cuss--he can't keep from breaking his heart over every skirt that brushes against him, but"--and she laughed softly--"darn his ugly picture, I like him anyhow!"
After supper Skinny hurried to the Golden Rule store. It was still open.
"Give me a white shirt--number fifteen," he said to the clerk; "and be blamed sure it's the right size--they ain't worth a cuss if they're too big!"
A lone rider guided his horse in the early night, among the black lavas, on the desolate desert near Capaline, the dead volcano. He rode to the south, in the direction of the Cimarron. Silently, steadily, like a dark shadow, the broncho picked his way among the fields of fire-blistered rock and held his course, unerringly, through the starlit gloom hanging over the earth before the late moon should flash its silver disk above the sand-hills miles to the east.
The rider was the Ramblin' Kid; the little horse--Captain Jack.
For a week, following the fight in Eagle Butte, the Ramblin' Kid had found shelter in the hut of "Indian Jake"--a hermit Navajo who, long ago, turned his face toward the flood of white civilization rolling over the last pitiful remnants of his tribe and drifted far toward the land of the rising sun. Among the scenes of desolation around the grimly cold volcano, alone, the old Indian made his last stand, and in a rude cabin, beside a tiny spring that seeped from under the black rock on the mountain-side, lived in splendid isolation--silent, brooding, desiring only to be left in peace with his few ponies, his small herd of cattle and the memories and traditions of his people.