His Royal Nibs

by Onoto Watanna

CHAPTER VII

“Say, Hilda, guess what I found to-day? I didn’t reckernize it at first until he said it was his. Viper rooted it up right under his window outside the bunkhouse. Well, I found that picture of his girl that he keeps in that locket. It must’ve slipped out, and Viper nearly chewed it up. So I yipped to him to come on out and I give it up to him and I says: ‘Whose her nibs anyway,’ and he says: ‘Someone I used to know,’ and I says: ‘Don’t you know her still?’ and he says: ‘Oh, yes, oh, yes,’ and he was lookin’ just as if he wasn’t hearin’ a word I was saying and he says as if he was talking to himself; ‘She was to have been my wife, you know.’ Just like that. Then he got up and he looked kind of queer, and he went on inside and come on out again with that locket in his hand and he sits down beside me on the steps and smokes without saying a word. So then I said, just to kid him: ‘Say, I’ll give you two of my buffalow skulls for that bit of dinky tin,’ meaning the locket, and he dumps his pipe and gives me the laugh and he says: ‘Nothing doing, old man. The sweetest girl in the world is enshined’—that’s what he said—‘right inside that “dinky bit of tin”!’”