“But it was done out of pure good-natur. ‘They got no business to talk like that to nobody,’ says John, ‘and I can correc’ them without it looking anything like a fight. Ain’t you noticed that that stops ’em from being sassy?’ It sure did, but I lived in fear and tremblin’ some feller would be an inch nearer than John cal’lated and would remain quiet for several million years. That would have broke his heart.
“Well, John put in a solid eight months without ever pinting a foot toward town. Then he collected and went off for a little quiet trip on his own hook. He said that nobody could ask for a better people than we were, yet we was kind of rough in our ways, and he wanted to see domestic felicity, and the soothing inflooence of Woman. That there was a strain in his ideas that made him need kind and gentle treatment oncet in so often.
“It ain’t, perhaps, necessary for me to say that I have been exposed to the inflooence of seventy or eighty Mrs. Scraggs for enough number of years to heave a sigh on what was comin’ to John; but I never guessed how complete his whole idea of the way this universe runs would be ruined.
“Off goes Johnny Boy, dressed up in his best black suit, that looked as if it had been made for a statue of a life-sized giant. The sleeves hung down to the middle of his fingers, the pants rolled up six inches at the bottom, and, as he was a ga’nt critter, there was enough stuff in them clothes to make it look as if he could turn right around inside them without attracting attention.
“And he come back.
“This is what happened. He come into the bull-pen slower than usual. He sat down on the bunk, with his face completely surrounded by hands, and he never opened his yorp till long after we’d et our supper. Then he took me by the arm, and says, ‘Scraggsy, you been my friend for a long time. Come out till I tell you something.’
“I went out and he smoked his cigareet for another half-hour until I had to say: ‘If you have got anything real to tell me, John, why don’t you do it to-night, while we’re sitting out here so comfortable in the frost?’
“Says he: ‘I got up there all right. It was a nice town. There was swimming. There was peace. There was sidewalks, and fellers wearing strange hats. Everything was there, and I think,’ he says, ‘I was more scared of the things I didn’t know whether they could happen or not than I was of the things I knew could happen.
“‘My soul had all the fuz roped off of it. I was positive I would never more take two wraps around a cayuse with them legs of mine, and chase a skitty steer some more. “No,” says I, “cow-punching is a lost art.” A feller gets all broke up and tackled with rheumatism before he’s—he’s—well, I ain’t sixty yet, by a durn sight. Anyhow, a feller gets broke up any time, and I think of those lovely homes and nice beds, and it seemed great.
“‘The gent behind the counter of the hotel shoved a book and a pen at me. I looked at ’em, wonderin’ if it was an autograft album. The little gals uster have ’em when I was young, and you put your John Hancock down and then something about the rose is red and the violets blue—I forget the rest.