"'Not any,' says I. 'A man who's got the nerve to hold up a train
single-handed wouldn't do a trick like that. I've knocked about enough
to know that them are the kind of men who put a value on a friend. Not
that I can claim being a friend of yours, Mr. Ogden,' says I, 'being
only your sheep-herder; but under more expeditious circumstances we
might have been.'

"'Forget the sheep temporarily, I beg,' says Ogden, 'and cut for deal.'

"About four days afterward, while my muttons was nooning on the
water-hole and I deep in the interstices of making a pot of coffee, up
rides softly on the grass a mysterious person in the garb of the being
he wished to represent. He was dressed somewhere between a Kansas City
detective, Buffalo Bill, and the town dog-catcher of Baton Rouge. His
chin and eye wasn't molded on fighting lines, so I knew he was only a
scout.

"'Herdin' sheep?' he asks me.

"'Well,' says I, 'to a man of your evident gumptional endowments, I
wouldn't have the nerve to state that I am engaged in decorating old
bronzes or oiling bicycle sprockets.'

"'You don't talk or look like a sheep-herder to me,' says he.

"'But you talk like what you look like to me,' says I.

"And then he asks me who I was working for, and I shows him Rancho
Chiquito, two miles away, in the shadow of a low hill, and he tells