for one fleeting moment he saw a homely, hilly farm in Michigan, with
rail fences and a squat old house with wide porch and hard-beaten path
from the kitchen door to the well and on to the stables; and down a
long slope that was topped with great old trees, Alexander P.
Dill shambling contentedly, driving with a crooked stick three
mild-mannered old cows. "The blamed chump--what did he go and pull
out for?" he asked himself fretfully. Then aloud: "I'm going to have
a heart-to-heart talk with the cook at the hotel, and if he don't give
us a real old round-up beefsteak, flopped over on the bare stovelids,
there'll be things happen I'd hate to name over. He can sure do the
business, all right; he used to cook for the Double-Crank. And you,"
he turned, elaborately cheerful, to Mr. Dill, "you are my guest."

"Thank you," smiled Mr. Dill, recovering himself and never guessing
how strange was the last sentence to the lips of Charming Billy Boyle.
"I shall be very glad to be the guest of somebody--once more."

"Yuh poor old devil, yuh sure drifted a long ways off your home
range," mused Billy. Out loud he only emphasized the arrangement with:

"Sure thing!"

CHAPTER VI.

"_That's My Dill Pickle!_"

Charming Billy Boyle was, to put it mildly, enjoying his enforced
vacation very much. To tell the plain truth and tell it without the
polish of fiction, he was hilariously moistened as to his gullet and
he was not thinking of quitting yet; he had only just begun.

He was sitting on an end of the bar in the Hardtip Saloon, his hat as
far back on his head as it could possibly be pushed with any hope of
its staying there at all. He had a glass in one hand, a cigarette in
the other, and he was raking his rowels rhythmically up and down the
erstwhile varnished bar in buzzing accompaniment, the while he chanted
with much enthusiasm:

"How old is she, Billy boy, Billy boy?
How old is she, charming Billy?
Twice six, twice seven,
Forty-nine and eleven--"

The bartender, wiping the bar after an unsteady sheepherder, was
careful to leave a generous margin around the person of Charming Billy
who was at that moment asserting with much emphasis:

"She's a young thing, and cannot leave her mother."

"Twice-six's-twelve, 'n' twice-seven's-four-r-teen, 'n' twelve 'n'
fourteen's--er--twelve--'n'--fourteen--" The unsteady sheepherder was
laboring earnestly with the problem. "She ain't no spring chick