“That’s the worst yet,” said Wade Ruggles, drawing a match along the thigh of his trousers to relight 10 his pipe, which had gone out during the excitement; “the man that insults this party with such a proposition, ought to be run out of the place.”
“What’s the matter with it?” demanded Budge.
“It’s too long in the fust place,” commented Ike Hoe; “it bothers a man to git his mouth around it and it hain’t any music, like the other names such as Starvation Kenyon, Hangman’s Noose, Blizzard Gorge and the rest. I stick to mine as the purtiest of all.”
“What’s that?”
“‘Blazes,’ short and sweet and innercent like.”
Landlord Ortigies was leaning with both elbows on the bar. The new name struck him favorably.
“I’m inclined to agree with Budge,” he said, “cause there hain’t any other place that’s hit onto it. All of them names that you chaps have tried to spring onto us, have been used in other places, or at least some part of the names, but, as Budge has observed, no galoot has scooped ‘Constantinople.’”
“’Cause no one ain’t fool enough,” observed Ike Hoe, who noted the drift of the sentiment.
“But they’ll pounce onto it powerful quick if we don’t grab it while it’s passin’; it’s a good long name, and what if it does make a chap sling the muscles of his jaw to warble it? All the better; it’ll make him think well of his town, which I prophesy is going to be the emporium of the West.”