with my iron. Of course, I wouldn't get all my sleepers, but--the
percentage would be in my favor. If too many sleepers show up in the
rodeo, though, folks would get mighty suspicious that someone was too
handy with his knife. We got a lot of sleepers in the last rodeo," he
concluded quietly.

And Patches, remembering what Little Billy had said about Nick Cambert
and Yavapai Joe, and with the talk of the visiting cowboys still fresh
in his mind, realized that he was making progress in his education.

Riding leisurely, and turning frequently aside for a nearer view of the
cattle they sighted here and there, they reached Toohey a little before
noon. Here, in a rocky hollow of the hills, a small stream wells from
under the granite walls, only to lose itself a few hundred yards away in
the sands and gravel of the wash. But, short as its run in the daylight
is, the water never fails. And many cattle come from the open range that
lies on every side, to drink, and, in summer time, to spend the heat of
the day, standing in the cool, wet sands or lying in the shade of the
giant sycamores that line the bank opposite the bluff. There are corrals
near-by and a rude cook-shack under the wide-spreading branches of an
old walnut tree; and the ground of the flat open space, a little back
from the water, is beaten bare and hard by the thousands upon thousands
of cattle that have at many a past rodeo-time been gathered there.

The two men found, as the Diamond-and-a-Half riders had said, several
animals suffering from those pests of the Arizona ranges, the
screwworms. As Phil explained to Patches while they watered their
horses, the screwworm is the larva of a blowfly bred in sores on living
animals. The unhealed wounds of the branding iron made the calves by far
the most numerous among the sufferers, and were the afflicted animals