"That was nip and tuck--but I got him, thank the Lord!" Whereupon he blew his nose violently, and went up to his supper with his hands in his pockets and his humorous lips pursed into a whistle.
Before long he was back, chuckling to himself as he bore down upon Ford in the corral, where he was industriously rubbing Rambler's sprained shoulder with liniment.
"The wife says you've got to come up to the house," he announced gleefully.

"You've gone and done the heroic again, and she wants to do something to show her gratitude." "You go back and tell your wife that I'm a bold, bad man and I won't come." Ford, to prove his sincerity, sat down upon the stout manger there, and crossed his legs with an air of finality.
"I did tell her," Mason confessed sheepishly.

"She wanted to know who you was, and I told her before I thought.

And she wanted to know what was the matter with your face, 'poor fellow,' and I told her that, too--as near as I knew it.

I told her," he stated sweepingly, "that you'd been on a big jamboree and had licked fourteen men hand-running.
There ain't," he confided with a twinkle, "any use at all in trying to keep a secret from your wife; not," he qualified, "from a wife like Kate! So she knows the whole darned thing, and she's sore as the deuce because I didn't bring you up to the house right away when you came.