"Why didn't you try the Waffle Parlor? They've got screens."
"My own cooking suits me just fine," Bill returned amiably.
"All right, if you like that kinda life," Jim carped. "I should think you'd want to get into something, Bill. You aren't any has-been——"
"Nope, I'm a never-was," Bill retorted shamelessly. "And a going-to-be," he added with naïve assurance. "You mark that down in your book, Jim. Some day you're going to brag about knowing Bill Dale. Some day your tone's going to be hearty and your hand'll be out when you see me coming. You guys will all of you be saying you knew me when."
The group bent backward to let the laughs out full and free. Into the midst of their mirth Luella came scrabbling with her pigeon-toed walk, her tail spread wide and her throat ruffled.
"You cut that out!" she shrieked angrily. "Hez! Here, Hez! Where the hell's that dog? Git outa here! Git a move on."
Bill grabbed her before she succeeded in shedding blood.
"Luella doesn't like the tone of that applause," he observed, holding her close to his chest while he smoothed her ruffled feathers. "Luella's a sensitive bird, and she stands up for her folks."
With three loaded burros nipping along before him, the whiskered Hezekiah slouching at his heels, and Luella and Sister Mitchell riding serenely the pack of Wise One, Bill left the town and struck off up the hill by a trail he knew that would cut off a great elbow of the highway, which was dusty and rutted with the passing of great, heavy ore wagons and automobiles loaded with fortune-hunters and camp equipment. At the crest of the long slope the burros stopped to breathe, and Bill turned and stood gazing back at the camp whose first fever was already cooling a bit, leaving the restless ones a bit bored and eager for some new strike in a fresh district, with the whooping boom times that must inevitably follow.
"Laugh, darn you!" Bill figuratively addressed Jim and his companions down there in the town. "You're bone from your necks up, or you'd see plumb through my talk—and be on my trail like ants after a leaky syrup can. Go ahead and laugh, and call me a fool behind my back! You won't take the notion to follow me, anyway."