“Been skinned too much, maybe?”
“Never gave anyone the chance.”
Rawson stared. This to him was something of a phenomenon.
“Well—well, Joe and I must go at it then. Talking of being skinned, the last fellow I served that way was a half-Dutchman, half-Jew sort of devil. When he’d lost he wouldn’t part—swore I’d cheated. Oh—I went for him, but he flashed off a pistol at me—darned fool couldn’t have hit a haystack. He didn’t get another chance of trying though. I was on him. Lord—Lord—the way I pounded that chap. He couldn’t stand on his legs for ten days after, and as soon as he could I kicked him off the place. Bully Rawson cheated!”
The righteous indignation of this last utterance was so inexpressibly comical to anybody with the most rudimentary knowledge of its utterer’s character, that the effort not to roar out laughing cost Fleetwood physical pain.
“Have another drink, Bully,” he said, by way of sparing himself the necessity of comment.
“Right you are, Joe,” reaching over for the square bottle. “You’re a white man, you are, if ever there was one. Bully Rawson cheated!” he went on, returning to the subject. “Mister, you may not know much of me, but I’m honest Bully Rawson has his faults, but all the world’ll tell you he’s honest, damn him! Eh, Joe?”
“Oh, we’re all honest—as long as we’ve got enough dibs and the other fellow hasn’t. It reminds me of a good joke I heard in the Durban Club the other day. There was a difference of opinion among a lot of the men at lunch as to the shadiness or not of some transaction. At last someone appealed to old Colonel Bowker, who hadn’t taken any part in the general jaw, and began in this way—‘Now, Colonel, as an honest man, what would you say—’ ‘Eh? as a what?’ ‘Why, an honest man.’ ‘But I don’t know that I am an honest man,’ says the old chap, in that dry, lack-lustre way of his. Of course, there was a big grin all round, and the first fellow expostulates, ‘Oh come—hang it all, Colonel. You don’t know—’ ‘No, I don’t. I’ve never been in want of a shilling or a breakfast in my life.’ There was a bigger grin then, for it wasn’t a bad way of putting the thing.”
“Haw-haw! damn good!” pronounced Rawson, who had got into the benign stage of potation, preparatory to the quarrelsome one, wherein he was wont to become sometimes a dangerous animal, and at all times a completely objectionable one. “We’ll see now, Joe. You two fellows come up and outspan at my place. We’ll have a roaring, sparking time, by—” some dozen deities and demons—“we will! I don’t see a white man every day, no by—” the same over again—“I don’t! Tell your boys to in-span, and—come along.”
“Not to-day, Bully. Can’t move the oxen another inch till they’ve had a good long rest.”