My two companions grew very sociable and began to talk freely over their pipes.

There were two bunks one above the other.

I climbed into the upper, leaving my friends, who occupied the lower, sitting together on a bench recounting different incidents in the careers of themselves and their cronies during the winter that had just passed.
Soon one of them asked the other what had become of a certain horse, a noted cutting pony, which I had myself noticed the preceding fall.

The question aroused the other to the memory of a wrong which still rankled, and he began (I alter one or two of the proper names): "Why, that was the pony that got stole.

I had been workin' him on rough ground when I was out with the Three Bar outfit and he went tender forward, so I turned him loose by the Lazy B ranch, and when I came back to git him there wasn't anybody at the ranch and I couldn't find him.
The sheep-man who lives about two miles west, under Red Clay butte, told me he seen a fellow in a wolfskin coat, ridin' a pinto bronco, with white eyes, leadin' that pony of mine just two days before; and I hunted round till I hit his trail and then I followed to where I'd reckoned he was headin' for--the Short Pine Hills.