With a remorseful impulse Jessica sprang forward and threw her arms about the old shepherd’s shoulders. He received her caress as calmly as he did everything else, though a keen observer might have seen a fleeting smile around his rugged lips.

Smiles did, indeed, spring to all three faces when, a moment later, the rattling of tins discovered Zulu rummaging a heap of empty cans, even in the very act of swallowing a highly decorated one.

The jingling startled Prince, also, from the repose into which he had now settled, and, after one terrified glance toward his unknown enemy, King Zu, he dashed across the mesa as if lameness were unknown.

At which Pedro smiled, well content.

“Good. He that uses his own legs spares his neighbors. Yes.”

12“Meaning that he would have to be exercised by somebody?”

12

The shepherd did not answer. He had lived alone so long amid the great solitudes of nature that speech had grown irksome to him. He regarded it a sin to waste words, and his young mistress understood this, if Mr. Hale did not. To this gentleman the situation presented itself as a very serious one. There was no habitation visible save the small hut, a place barely sufficient to its owner’s simple needs and utterly inadequate to those of a lately recovered invalid. He was not strong enough to make his way to the valley on foot, and even if Prince were now able to carry him, he felt it would be brutal to impose so hard a task.

But Jessica came to his aid with the suggestion:

“If you’ll come and rest behind the cabin I’ll make you a cup of coffee on Pedro’s little stove. He often lets me when I come up to see him, and then, when you’ve rested, we’ll go home. I am so angry I can hardly breathe.”

“Indeed; I should never have guessed it,” he answered, laughing, and allowing the girl to lead him to the shelter proposed.

“Ah! but I am. And a gentlewoman never gets angry. Least of all with such a darling as Pedro. You see, he ought to have been about dying, and he hasn’t even a single ache!”

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