I swear, I was prospectin' f'r a good hole to plant him in all the rest o' the trip. I goes right to the ranch when we pulled in. The Old Man an' Josie was a-sittin' in the firelight, an' she had the baby, a yearlin' on her lap, and the boy, a long two-year-old, in the crib. Outside of a nest o' young wild ducks, I never seen anything softer and cuter. I reports an' asks instructions as to the best way of disposin' of Mr. Jackleg's remains.
"Quicklime," says he ruminatin'ly, "is a good and well-recognized scheme; but we haven't any, Aconite, have we? Or we might incorporate him into that burnin' lignite bed over in the butte. Boxin' him up an' shippin' him to fictitious consignees involves a trip to the railroad, an' creatin', as it does, a bad odor, an' stickin' a strugglin' railroad company for the freight, it never seemed to me quite the Christian thing. Don't you agree with me, Aconite?"
"Now, the God's truth is, I was speakin' parabolically about this projected homicide, but no man can bluff me, an' when the Old Man seemed to fall in with it in that heart-to-heart way, I made a lightnin' cat-hop, an' told him as sober as a Keeley alumnus that the lignite bed seemed most judicious to me, an' when should we load up the catafalque? Then Mrs. E. breaks in with a sort o' gugglin' laugh.
"Jim," says she, "you ought to be ashamed of yourself! Mr. Driscoll," addressin' me by my name, which never was Aconite, reely, "Mr. Driscoll, Mr. Elkins is not serious in his remarks."
"Neither'm I," says I.
"Of course not," says she. "We fully understand that."
"Sure," says the Old Man. "Let the lawyer take its course. Which will be assumin' possession of the ten thousand dogies; and I feel sure he'll want to leave you in charge of 'em. He's stuck on you, Aconite."
"See him in Helena fust," says I.
"But wait a minute," says Mr. Elkins. "Somebody's got to take charge of this stuff for the mortgagee, if he keeps on thinkin' as he does now. You're our friend. It'll be more agreeable in every way to have you than, say, Bill Skeels, of the O-Bar-X."
Of course I gets roped, throwed an' branded at last, an' Mr. Jackleg goes away takin' my receipt f'r ten thousand head, more or less, of steers branded "J" known in the cattle business as "J-Up-And-Down," the same bein' on the ranges at the head-waters of the Cheyenne, Moreau, Little Missouri, an' other streams, an' God knows where else, more definitely described in a certain indenture of mawgitch, and so forth and so on, till death comes to your relief. An' James R. Elkins was reduced to a few hundred white faces he'd put in as a side-line, an' I feelin' like a sheepman unmasked!