approval.

A few seconds later, on the other side of the sandy wash, the Dean
skillfully checked their headlong career, with a narrow margin of safety
between the team and the gate.

"I reckon we'll get through with less fuss if you'll open it," he said
to Patches. Then to Buck and Prince: "Whoa! you blamed fools. Can't you
stand a minute?"

"Stella's been devilin' me to get a machine ever since Jim Reid got
his," he continued, while the horses were repeating their preliminary
contortions, and Patches was regaining his seat. "But I told her I'd be
scared to death to ride in the fool contraption."

At this Buck and Prince, in a wild riot of animal strength and spirit,
leaped a slight depression in the road with such vigor that the front
wheels of the buckboard left the ground. Patches glanced sidewise at his
employer, with a smile of delighted appreciation, but said nothing.

The Dean liked him for that. The Dean always insists that the hardest
man in the world to talk to is the one who always has something to say
for himself.

"Why," he continued, with a burst of honest feeling, "if I was ever to
bring one of them things home to the Cross-Triangle, I'd be ashamed to
look a horse or steer in the face."

They dashed through a patch of wild sunflowers that in the bottom lands
grow thick and rank; whirled past the tumble-down corner of an old fence