“Sure,” grinned Denver, “but cut out that ‘friend’ talk. It makes me kind of nervous.”
181“I’ll do it!” promised Bunker, “I’ll do anything you ask me. You saved my bacon on them claims. That snooping Dutch Professor tipped them jumpers off that I’d promised my wife not to shoot, but I guess when they see you come rambling up the gulch they begin to feel like Davey Crockett’s coon.
“‘Don’t shoot, Davey,’ he says, ‘I know you’ll get me.’ And he came right down off the limb.” Old Bunker laughed uproariously and slapped Denver on the back, after which he took him over to the house and announced a guest for dinner.
“Sit down, boy, sit down,” he insisted hospitably as Denver spoke of going home to dress, “you’re company just the way you are. As Lord Chesterfield says: ‘A clean shirt is half of full dress.’ And a pair of overalls, I reckon, is the rest of it. Say, did you hear what Murray said when we took Dave over there, looking like something that the cat had brought in?
“‘My Gawd,’ he says, ‘what has happened to the mine?’
“That was something like a deacon that I worked for one time when he was fixing to paint his barn. He slung a ladder on an old, rotten rope and sent me up on it to work and about half an hour afterwards the rope gave way and dropped me, ladder and all, to the ground. The deacon was at the house when he heard the crash and he came running with his coat-tails straight out.
182“‘Goodness gracious!’ he hollered, ‘did you spill the paint?’
“‘No,’ I says, ‘but I will!’ And I kicked all his paint-cans over.
“Well, old Murray is like that deacon; you touch his pocket and you touch his heart–he’s always thinking about money. He’d been planning for months to slip in and jump these claims and here you come along and do the assessment work and knock him out of five of ’em. The boys say he’s sure got blood in his eye and is cussing you out a blue streak. That’s a nice gun you got off of Dave–how many notches has it got on the butt? Only three, eh? Well, say, if he ever sends over to ask for it I’ve got another one that I’ll loan you. You want to go heeled, understand? Murray’s busy right now bossing those three shifts of miners that are driving that adit tunnel, but when he gets the time he’ll leave his glass eye on a fence post and come over to see what we’re doing. Didn’t you ever hear about Murray’s glass eye?
“Well, they say he lost his good one looking for a dollar that he dropped; but here’s the big joke about the fence-post. He got his start down in the valley, raising alfalfa and feeding stock, and he always hired Indians whenever he could because they spent all their time-checks at the store. A Mexican or a white man might hold out a few dollars, or spend the whole wad for booze; but Indians are barred from getting drunk and they’ve only got one use for money. Yes, they believe it 183was made to spend, not to bury alongside of some fence-post. And speaking of fence-posts brings me back to the point–Old Murray had a bunch of big, lazy Apaches working by the day cleaning out a ditch. He was down there at daylight and watched ’em like a hawk, but every time he’d go into town the whole bunch would sit down for a talk. Well, he had to go to town so one day he called ’em up and made ’em a little talk.