Two Hearts That Beat As One
"Which I puts it up as how you ain't never heard about that time that Hardenberg and
Strokher--the Englisher--had a friendly go with bare knuckles--ten rounds it was--all
along o' a feemale woman?"
It is a small world and I had just found out that my friend, Bunt McBride--horse-
wrangler, miner, faro-dealer and bone-gatherer--whose world was the plains and ranges
of the Great Southwest, was known of the Three Black Crows, Hardenberg, Strokher and
Ally Bazan, and had even foregathered with them on more than one of their ventures for
Cyrus Ryder's Exploitation Agency--ventures that had nothing of the desert in them, but
that involved the sea, and the schooner, and the taste of the great-lunged canorous trades.
"Ye ain't never crossed the trail o' that mournful history?"
I professed my ignorance and said:
"Mister Man," returned Bunt soberly, as one broaching a subject not to be trifled with,
"They sure did. Friendly-like, y'know--like as how two high-steppin', sassy gents figures
out to settle any little strained relations--friendly-like but considerable keen."
He took a pinch of tobacco from his pouch and a bit of paper and rolled a cigarette in the
twinkling of an eye, using only one hand, in true Mexican style.
"Now," he said, as he drew the first long puff to the very bottom of the leathern valves he
calls his lungs. "Now, I'm a-goin' for to relate that same painful proceedin' to you, just so
as you kin get a line on the consumin' and devourin' foolishness o' male humans when
they's a woman in the wind. Woman," said Bunt, wagging his head thoughtfully at the
water, "woman is a weather-breeder. Mister Dixon, they is three things I'm skeered of.
The last two I don't just rightly call to mind at this moment, but the first is woman. When
I meets up with a feemale woman on my trail, I sheers off some prompt, Mr. Dixon; I
sheers off. An' Hardenberg," he added irrelevantly, "would a-took an' married this
woman, so he would. Yes, an' Strokher would, too."
"Was there another man?" I asked.
"No," said Bunt. Then he began to chuckle behind his mustaches. "Yes, they was." He
smote a thigh. "They sure was another man for fair. Well, now, Mr. Man, lemmee tell
you the whole 'how.'
"It began with me bein' took into a wild-eyed scheme that that maverick, Cy Ryder, had
cooked up for the Three Crows. They was a row down Gortamalar way. Same gesabe
