"Hold on, Billy! You're grazin' on the wrong side of the range if you think I'm preachin'. My God! I hate preachin' worse than I could hate hell if I thought they was one. My little old ideas is mine. I roped 'em and branded 'em and I'm breakin' 'em in to ride to suit me. I ain't askin' nobody to risk gettin' throwed ridin' any of my stock. Sabe?"
"But a chap may peek through the fence and watch, mayn't he?"
"Sure! Mebby you're breakin' some stock of your own like that. If you are, any little old rig I got is yours."
"Thank you. And I'm not joking. Perhaps I'll get the right grip on things later. I've been used to town and the pace. I've always had money, but I never felt really clean, inside and out, until now. I never before burned my bridges and went it under my own flag."
Overland nodded sagely. "Uhuh. It's the air. Your feelin' clean and religious-like is nacheral up here. Don't worry if it feels queer to you at first—you'll get used to it. Why, I quit cussin', myself, when everything seems so dum' quiet. Sounds like the whole works had stopped to listen to a fella. Swearin' ain't so hefty then. Sort of outdoor stage fright, I reckon. Say, do you believe preachin' ever did much good?"
"Sometimes I've thought it did."
"I seen a case once," began Overland reminiscently. "It was Toledo Blake. He was a kind of bum middleweight scrapper when he was workin' at it. When he wasn't trainin' he was a kind of locoed heavyweight—stewed most of the time. It was one winter night in Toledo. Me and him went into one of them 'Come-In-Stranger' rescue joints. 'Course, they was singin' hymns and prayin' in there, but it was warmer than outside, so we stayed.
"After a while up jumps the foreman of that gospel outfit. His foretop was long, and he wore it over one ear like a hoss's when the wind is blowin'.
"He commenced wrong, I guess. He points down the room to where me and Toledo was settin', and he hollers, 'Go to the ant, you slugger! Consider her game and get hep to it,' or somethin' similar.
"That word 'slugger' kind of jarred Toledo. He jumps up kind of mad. 'Mebby I am a slugger, and mebby I ain't, but you needn't to get personal about it. Anyhow, I ain't got no aunt.'