“Why—er—I suppose we would,” Allan faltered.
“Well, there you are!” said Burley, triumphantly. “That settles it.”
It took the others some time to prove to him that it didn’t settle it, and Burley listened with polite, but disapproving, attention. When the argument was concluded, he shook his head sorrowfully.
“You’re a lot of Indians!” he said. “You’re not doing the square thing by me, and I’m going to pull my freight.” He drew himself out of the chair and rescued his big felt hat from beneath it. There was a general pushing back of chairs. “You and Mr. Ware must come around to my tepee some night soon,” Burley told Hal, “and we’ll have another pow-wow. Seems like I’d done all the chinning to-night.” He shook hands with Allan, who strove to bear the pain with fortitude and only grimaced once, and said in quite a matter-of-fact way, “I guess you and I are going to be partners. Good night.”
Allan muttered that he hoped so, and after the three visitors had taken their departures he examined his hand under the light to see if bruises or dislocations were visible.
“I wonder,” he asked himself, with a rueful smile, “if he shakes hands very often with his partners?”
[CHAPTER VI]
“RIGHT GUARD BACK!”
November started in with an Indian summer, but by the middle of the month the spell had broken, and a week of hard, driving rain succeeded the bright weather. Until then Allan had spent almost every afternoon on the cinder-track, running the half mile at good speed, doing the mile and a half inside his time, occasionally practising sprinting, and, once a week, jogging around until he had left nine laps behind him and had covered a quarter of a mile over his distance.