They had dinner in the open-air, tree-walled dining-room, and Saxon noted that it was Billy who paid the reckoning for the four. They knew many of the young men and women at the other tables, and greetings and fun flew back and forth. Bert was very possessive with Mary, almost roughly so, resting his hand on hers, catching and holding it, and, once, forcibly slipping off her two rings and refusing to return them for a long while. At times, when he put his arm around her waist, Mary promptly disengaged it; and at other times, with elaborate obliviousness that deceived no one, she allowed it to remain.
And Saxon, talking little but studying Billy Roberts very intently, was satisfied that there would be an utter difference in the way he would do such things... if ever he would do them. Anyway, he'd never paw a girl as Bert and lots of the other fellows did. She measured the breadth of Billy's heavy shoulders.
“Why do they call you 'Big' Bill?” she asked. “You're not so very tall.”
“Nope,” he agreed. “I'm only five feet eight an' three-quarters. I guess it must be my weight.”
“He fights at a hundred an' eighty,” Bert interjected.
“Oh, cut it,” Billy said quickly, a cloud-rift of displeasure showing in his eyes. “I ain't a fighter. I ain't fought in six months. I've quit it. It don't pay.”
“Yon got two hundred the night you put the Frisco Slasher to the bad,” Bert urged proudly.
“Cut it. Cut it now.—Say, Saxon, you ain't so big yourself, are you? But you're built just right if anybody should ask you. You're round an' slender at the same time. I bet I can guess your weight.”
“Everybody guesses over it,” she warned, while inwardly she was puzzled that she should at the same time be glad and regretful that he did not fight any more.
“Not me,” he was saying. “I'm a wooz at weight-guessin'. Just you watch me.” He regarded her critically, and it was patent that warm approval played its little rivalry with the judgment of his gaze. “Wait a minute.”