"My heart bleeds for her," he told Ajax.
"The bounder with the bleeding heart," said Ajax to me that same evening.
"We don't know that he is a bounder," I objected.
"He bounds, and he is as unconscious of his bounds as a kangaroo. As for Jim, he is the apex of the world's pyramid of fools."
"Angela can take care of herself."
"Can she?"
At our fall round-up, Ajax's question was answered. Conspicuously Angela attached herself to Tomlinson-Thorpe, regardless of the gaping eyes and mouths of neighbours, Puritan to the backbone in everything except the stealing of unbranded calves.
Most unfortunately, Thorpe--I think more kindly of him when I don't give him his double-barrelled name--was daily exhibiting those qualities which had carried him through scrums. In a bar-room brawl with two pot-valiant cowboys, he had come out supremely "on top." They had jeered at his riding-breeches, at his bob-tailed cob, at his English accent, and Thorpe had suffered them gladly. Then, quite suddenly, Angela's name fell upon a silence. As suddenly Thorpe seized both men, one in each hand, and brought their heads together with a crash which the barkeeper described afterwards as "splendiferous." With an amazing display of physical violence, he flung them apart, each falling in a crumpled heap of profanity upon the floor.
"Don't fool with that feller," was the verdict in the foothills.
The affair would have been of no consequence had not Jim been present when the row took place. Jim might have played the beau rôle had he carried a pistol. Admittedly he would have been licked in a fight with either cowboy singly. Thorpe, so I was told, entreated Jim to keep the story from his wife. Angela had it, with slight exaggeration, from the hero-worshipper's lips within an hour. "It brought her heart into her mouth, I tell you," the simple fellow told Ajax, and later Ajax murmured to me: "I wonder whether it struck Angela that Jim would have tackled both of 'em, if Thorpe had not interfered."