ricature;
and he reeked of the most malignant tobacco Mrs. Laithe had ever
encountered. Only the gold-rimmed spectacles, the nearsighted, peering
gray eyes, and a narrow zone of white forehead under his hat brim served
to recall the somewhat fastidious, sedate, and rather oldish-looking
young man who had parted from her.

He smiled at her with a complacency that made it almost a smirk. Then he
boisterously kissed her again before she could evade him, and uttered
once more that yell of lawless abandon.

"Clarence!" she expostulated, but he waved her to silence with an
imperious hand.

"Quickest way to tell the story, Nell--that's my paean of victory. Sleep?
Slept like a night watchman. Eat? I debauched myself with the rowdiest
sort of food every chance I got--fried bacon, boiled beans,
baking-powder biscuit, black coffee that would bite your finger
off--couldn't get enough; smoked when I wasn't eating or sleeping; drank
raw whisky, too--whisky that would etch copper. Work? I worked harder
than a Coney Island piano player, fell over asleep at night and got up
asleep in the morning--when they kicked me the third time. And I
galloped up and down cliffs after runaway steers where I wouldn't have
crawled on my hands and knees two weeks before. And now that whole bunch
of boys treat me like one of themselves. I found out they called me
'Willie Four-eyes' when I first came here. Now they call me 'Doc,' as
friendly as you can imagine, and Buck Devlin told me last night I could
ride a streak of lightning with the back cinch busted, if I tried."

He broke off to light the evil pipe ostentatiously, while she watched
him, open eyed, not yet equal to speech.

"Now run in like a good girl and see if Ma Pierce has plenty of
fragments from the noonday feast. Anything at all--I could eat a deer
hide with the hair on."

Wavering incredulously, she left to do his bidding. As he led his horse
around to the corral he roared a snatch from Buck Devlin's favorite
ballad, with an excellent imitation of the cowboy manner:

"Oh, bur-ree me _not_ on the lone prai-_ree-e_--"

After he had eaten he slouched into a hammock on the veranda with
extravagant groans of repletion, and again lighted his pipe. His sister
promptly removed her chair beyond the line of its baleful emanations.

"Well, Sis," he began, "that trip sure did for me good and plenty. Me
for the high country uninterrupted hereafter!"

She regarded him with an amused smile