e
picture of a bronzed rancher, his arms loaded with roses, saying, in
boyish diffidence:

"Mister, you fit him fair and you sure fixed him good. Just a few
roses--they're so thick over to our place that they're getting a pest.
Thought mebbe they'd be nice for you to look at while you was tied up to
a chair nursing Pete's soovenir!"

One visitor whose bulk filled the doorway, the expansion of his smile
spreading over a bounteous rotundity of cheek, impressed himself as a
personality who had the distinction in avoirdupois that Jim Galway had in
leanness. In his hand he had five or six peonies as large as saucers.

"Every complete community has a fat man, seh!" he announced, with a
certain ample bashfulness in keeping with his general amplitude and a
musical Southern accent.

"If it wants to feel perfectly comfortable it has!" said Jack, by way
of welcome.

"Well, I'm the fat man of Little Rivers, name being Bob Worther!"
said he, grinning as he came across the room with an amazingly quick,
easy step.

"No rivals?" inquired Jack.

"No, seh! I staked out the first claim and I've an eye out for any
new-comers over the two hundred mark. I warn them off! Jasper Ewold is up
to two hundred, but he doesn't count. Why, you ought to have seen me,
seh, before I came to this valley!"

"A living skeleton?"

"No, seh! Back in Alabama I had reached a point where I broke so many
chairs and was getting so nervous from sudden falls in the midst of
conversation, when I made a lively gesture that I didn't dare sit down
away from home except at church, where they had pews. I weighed three
hundred and fifty!"

"And now?"

"I acknowledge two hundred and forty, including my legs, which are very
powerful, having worked off that extra hundred. I've got the boss job
for making a fat man spider-waisted--inspector of ditches and dams. Any
other man would have to use a horse, but I hoof it, and that's economy
all around. And being big I grow big things. Violets wouldn't be much
more in my line than drawnwork. I've got this whole town beat on
peonies and pumpkins. Being as it's a fat man's pleasure to cheer
people up, I dropped in to bring you a few peonies and to say that,
considering the few well-selected words you spoke to Pete Leddy on this
town's behalf, I'm prepared to vote for you for anything from coroner
to president, seh!"

Later, after Bob had gone, a small girl brought a spray of gladiolus,
their slender stems down to her