need me. If I know you'll do that I'll feel a lot
better satisfied."

"If I need you be sure that I shall let you know. And I'll say
that 'It's a comfort to have met one white man,'" Marian assured him
hurriedly, her anxious eyes on her approaching husband.

She need not have worried over his coming, so far as Bud was concerned.
For Bud was in the sitting-room and had picked Honey off the piano
stool, had given her a playful shake and was playing the Blue Danube
as its composer intended that it should be played, when Lew entered the
kitchen and kicked the door shut behind him.

Bud spent the forenoon conscientiously trying to teach Honey that the
rests are quite as important to the tempo of a waltz measure as are the
notes. Honey's talent for music did not measure up to her talent for
coquetry; she received about five dollars' worth of instruction and no
blandishments whatever, and although she no doubt profited thereby, at
last she balked and put her lazy white hands over her ears and refused
to listen to Bud's inexorable "One, two, three, one, two, three-and one,
two, three." Whereupon Bud laughed and returned to the bunk-house.

He arrived in the middle of a heated argument over Jeff Hall's tactics
in racing Skeeter, and immediately was called upon for his private,
personal opinion of Sunday's race. Bud's private, personal opinion
being exceedingly private and personal, he threw out a skirmish line of
banter.

Smoky could run circles around that Skeeter horse, he boasted, and
Jeff's manner of riding was absolutely unimportant, non-essential and
immaterial. He was mighty glad that holdup man had fallen down, last
Sunday, before he got his hands on any money, because that money was
going to talk long and loud to Jeff Hall next Sunday. Now that Bud had
started running his horse for money, working for wages looked foolish
and unprofitable. He was now working merely for healthful exercise and
to pass the time away between Sundays. His real mission in life, he had
discovered, was to teach Jeff's bunch that gambling is a sin.

The talk was carried enthusiastically to the dinner table, where Bud
ignored the scowling proximity of Lew and repeated his boasts in a
revised form as an indirect means of letting Marian know that he meant
to play the Burroback game in the Burroback way--or as nearly as he
could--and keep his honesty more or less intact. He did not think she
would approve, but he wanted her to know.

Once, wh