t looks bad, Shorty. Somebody
else is in the market. Those twenty-eight eggs are liable to cause us
trouble. You see, the success of the corner consists in holding every
last--"

He broke off to stare at his partner. A pronounced change was coming
over Shorty--one of agitation masked by extreme deliberation. He closed
the salve-box, wiped his hands slowly and thoroughly on Sally's furry
coat, stood up, went over to the corner and looked at the thermometer,
and came back again. He spoke in a low, toneless, and super-polite
voice.

"Do you mind kindly just repeating over how many eggs you said the man
didn't sell to you?" he asked.

"Twenty-eight."

"Hum," Shorty communed to himself, with a slight duck of the head of
careless acknowledgment. Then he glanced with slumbering anger at the
stove. "Smoke, we'll have to dig up a new stove. That fire-box is burned
plumb into the oven so it blacks the biscuits."

"Let the fire-box alone," Smoke commanded, "and tell me what's the
matter."

"Matter? An' you want to know what's the matter? Well, kindly please
direct them handsome eyes of yourn at that there pail settin' on the
table. See it?"

Smoke nodded.

"Well, I want to tell you one thing, just one thing. They's just
exactly, preecisely, nor nothin' more or anythin' less'n twenty-eight
eggs in the pail, an' they cost, every danged last one of 'em, just
exactly seven great big round iron dollars a throw. If you stand in
cryin' need of any further items of information, I'm willin' and free to
impart."

"Go on," Smoke requested.

"Well, that geezer you was dickerin' with is a big buck Indian. Am I
right?"

Smoke nodded, and continued to nod to each question.

"He's got one cheek half gone where a bald-face grizzly swatted him. Am
I right? He's a dog-trader--right, eh? His name is Scar-Face Jim. That's
so, ain't it? D'ye get my drift?"

"You mean we've been bidding--?"

"Against each other. Sure thing. That squaw's his wife, an' they keep
house on the hill back of the hospital. I could 'a' got them eggs for
two a throw if you hadn't butted in."

"And so could I," Smoke laughed, "if you'd kept out, blame you! But it
doesn't amount to anything. We know that we've got the corner. That's
the big thing."

Shorty spent the next hour wrestling with a stub of a pencil on the
margin of a three-year-old newspaper, and the more interminable and
hieroglyphic grew his figures the more cheerful he became.

"There she st