Dad was still talking, rubbing his fuzzy chin with reflective hand, looking along the hillside to where Rabbit stood watch over the sheep.
“Tim wanted to buy that big yellow collie from Rabbit,” he said. “Offered her eighty dollars. Might as well try to buy me from that woman!”
“I expect she’d sell you quicker than she would the collie, Dad.”
“Wish she would sell that dang animal, he never has made friends with me. The other one and me we git along all right, but that feller he’s been educated on the scent of that old vest, and he’ll be my enemy to my last day.”
“You’re a lucky man to have a wife like Rabbit, anyhow, dog or no dog. It’s hard for me to believe she ever took a long swig out of a whisky jug, Dad.”
“Well, sir, me and Rabbit was disputin’ about that a day or so ago. Funny how I seem to ’a’ got mixed up on that, but I guess it wasn’t Rabbit that used to pull my jug too hard. That must ’a’ been a Mexican woman I was married to one time down by El Paso.”
“I’ll bet money it was the Mexican woman. How did Rabbit get her face scalded?”
“She tripped and fell in the hog-scaldin’ vat like I told you, John.”
Mackenzie looked at him severely, almost ready to take the convalescent’s prerogative and quarrel with his best friend.