“Shan't tell him a thing, Dick, not a thing.”
Wood turned shrewd grey eyes on the young man, and smiled away the shortness of his answer. The eyes were full of humour and liking for the man beside him, and bordered on a network of wrinkles.
“Supposing you feel like firing some of his men, you'd better go and see him,” he added.
“All right, I'll do that.”
“And take your time, of course,” said Wood. “Hang on till you're both satisfied. He's peaceful, only if you scare him to death, he might feel injured.”
“Well, I'm glad to oblige him——”
“That's it. Talk to him that way. Fire 'em, of course, but—you'd better make it all right with Freiburger. A man that rides in a cross-country schooner, sometimes he has to join the shoving.”
“That's all right.”
Hennion smoked in silence a few moments, then took his cigar out and added, “I see.”
“I never knew a man that made a living by looking up rows for himself,” said Wood, wrinkling his eyes thoughtfully at the coils of smoke, “except one, and that wasn't what you'd call a comfortable living. It was a man named Johnson, in St. Joseph, somewhere about '60. He started in to fight the landlord of the Morton House for his bill, till the landlord was full of knots, and his features painful, and his secretest rheumatism woke up, and his interest in his bill was dead. That was all right, supposing Johnson didn't really have the price. I guess, like enough, he hadn't. But he went round town then making the same arrangement with other folks, a lawyer and a liveryman and others. Sometimes he had to fight, sometimes he didn't, but after a while somebody drew a gun on him, and St. Joseph buried him with a sigh. He never was really comfortable.”