“I ain’t no fighter—I don’t pretend to be a fighter,” he mumbled. “I knew he was going to lick me if I kicked him. But that’s all right! There’s three teeth loose and my eyes are bunging! I can feel ’em! But it’s all right. If anybody thinks it was a scuffle between friends, he’d better take another think. I’ve took a licking to show some folks that there’s such a thing as being mistook in a man.”
I hadn’t straightened out my opinions, exactly, but I felt sudden pity and new respect for Mr. Flye, and some emotion even deeper. I helped him to his feet and took him into the wash-room of the hotel and fixed him up as best I could.
“I don’t blame you so very much,” he kept assuring me, whimpering through his bruised and bleeding lips. “It probably hasn’t seemed natural to you—it hasn’t seemed natural to me. This world is full of crooks and I s’pose you’ve been up against a lot of ’em. I done one crooked thing myself once when I kept water away from a drove of hogs for two days and then let ’em drink all they could hold just before I sold ’em live weight to a Snake River drover. But that drover had stolen two cayuses off’n my uncle! I didn’t know what I could do to show you, sir! Probably what I have done don’t show you. But I’ve done my best. It was all I could think of on short notice. I’ll let a dozen men beat me up if you will only understand that I ain’t going to do you or try to do you!”
That spirit of humble martyrdom was certainly getting to me!
“Look here, Mr Flye,” I blurted, “I don’t understand at all. Why in blazes are you taking all this interest in me?”
He gazed at me out of those pathetic, pale-blue eyes around which blue-black circles were settling. It was a lingering and wistful gaze.
“I don’t know, sir. It came over me all of a sudden. It ain’t often I take to anybody. It just came over me. You’re a real gent—you knowed just how to handle me. You know how to handle me now! Ain’t you doing the friendly act, hey?”
We were alone in the wash-room; the guests of the hotel flocked there only at meal-time.
“You can see how it looked to me—a stranger here—you two fellows chasing me up!”
“I don’t blame you, sir,” he agreed, meekly. “This world is full of crooks.”