He took the pony's lead gratefully and took a moment to give Specks a quick rub between the eyes. A ghost of a smile, content and affectionate, sunk into the corners of Jo's mouth and lingered there when he looked back at Grete. Specks immediately ducked his head out from under Jo's hand and began eating the bale out from under him. Jo clucked and tugged him up by the halter, muttering, 'Cripes, your fat enough already.' Specks gave him a long look, one ear cocked shrewdly forward.

"It's nothing, really," Jo tried to assure her. "It's an old injury that acts up. Part of turning into an old man, I guess." True. All of it completely true. Just maybe not ever stitch of the seam, so to speak. In fact he was already lugging himself up (using his handhold on Speck's halter as lever, though he was hoping she didn't take too much notice of that) when she started on tiger chow.

Jo looked at her sideways, trying to assess if what she was saying had any truth in it or not because the story sounded like something laughably exaggerated. Not that there was anything particularly funny about some poor b*****d getting chomped on by a wild cat, but it definitely had a ring of 'stories you tell small children to make them behave themselves.'

Still...

"Still, I don't want to be sitting around with my feet in the air." It went without saying that if he proved to be useless it was more than likely he'd find himself on the side of the road and probably not on a road that was going to lead him back to the California he knew, if a California at all.