Only a peon's loyalty; but something hard and bitter and reckless, something that might have proved a more serious handicap than a strange riata, dropped away from Jack's mood and left him very nearly his normal self.
It was as if the warmth of the rawhide struck through the chill which Teresita's unreasoning spite had brought to the heart of him, and left there a little glow.
"Gracias, Diego," he said, and smiled in the way that made one love him.
"Let it stay until I have need of it.

It will surely fly true, to-day, since it has been warmed thus by thy friendship." From an impulse of careless kindness he said it, even though he had been touched by the peon's anxiety for his welfare.

But Diego's heart was near to bursting with gratitude and pride; those last two words--he would not have exchanged the memory of them for the gold medal itself.
That his blue-eyed god should address him, a mere peon, as "thy," the endearing, intimate pronoun kept for one's friends! The tears stood in Diego's black eyes when he heard; and Diego was no weakling, but a straight-backed stoic of an Indian, who stood almost as tall as the Senor Jack himself and who could throw a full-grown steer to the ground by twisting its head.

He bowed low and turned to fumble the sweet, dried grasses in Surry's manger; and beneath his coarse shirt the feel of the rawhide was sweeter than the embrace of a loved woman.
"You want to take mighty good care of this little nag of mine," Dade observed irrelevantly, his fingers combing wistfully the crinkly mane.
"There'll never be another like him in this world.

And if there was, it wouldn't be him." "I reckon it's asking a good deal of you, to think of using him at all." For the first time Jack became conscious of his selfishness.