"Bully for you, Hugh!" Long Tom said; "just you put it in hot and strong. I tell you it ain't nice if one does go down to the settlements in the winter, when work is slack, to see people look at you as if you wur a wild beast, who is only waiting his chance to hold up the hull town. Why, I have seen women pull their children indoors as I came along, as if I wur a mountain lion, and was meaning to draw my six-shooter on them just for amusement."
"Well," Hugh said, "I must say I heard stories at M'Kinney of cow-boys coming down to a town and riding about shooting off the hats of the inhabitants, making targets of the bottles in the saloons, and generally turning the place topsy-turvy. Of course I didn't believe it all."
There was silence round the fire, and then Straight Charley said:
"Well, Lightning, I won't say as you have been altogether deceived as to that, and I won't deny as I have taken part in sprees myself, but you see it don't hurt no one. It is just fun. If we do shoot the heads off the bottles, we pays for them, and it makes one laugh till one can scarcely sit in a saddle to see an old cuss jump when you put a bullet through his stove-pipe hat. It is his fault for wearing such a thing, which is an unnatural invention altogether and should be discouraged."
"We do carry on," Broncho Harry agreed, "thar ain't no denying it. When a man has been out in these plains for six months working worse than a nigger, and that without a drop of liquor, it is natural as he should go in for a high old time when he gits down to a town with money in his pockets; but thar ain't no real harm in it. We know how we can shoot, and that if we fire at a hat there ain't no chance of our hitting the head inside. It just makes things lively for them for a bit, and there is never no trouble, unless anyone is fool enough to take the matter up and make a muss about it."
"I am not saying you do any real harm, Broncho, only you see the people in the towns don't know how well you shoot. If you knock a pipe out of my mouth, as you have done once or twice, I only laugh, because I know there was no chance in the world of your hitting me; but you see they don't all know that. And so when a man finds there are two holes in his hat an inch above his head, he thinks he has had a marvellous escape of being murdered."
"I don't deny as there is something in that," Broncho Harry said reflectively; "but you see it is in their ignorance that the mistake comes in, not in our shooting. Anyhow, you see we have got to do something to amuse ourselves, and we might do worse than just skeer a few store-men, who take it out of us by charging us about double the price they charge anyone else."
Hugh was not convinced by the argument, but he felt that it was of no use to pursue the subject further.
"How do the cows know their calves?" he asked one day, as at the end of a march some of the cows were loudly lowing for their offspring to come to them.
"By smell," Broncho Harry replied promptly.