The Friar sighed, pursed up his lips, and sez: “I wish I could help him.”
“Help him all you can, Friar,” sez I; “but after the fuse is burnin’, you pull yourself out to safety. Ty Jones could easy spare you without goin’ into mournin’.”
The Friar rode on about his business, an’ me an’ Horace went back to the ranch, him pumpin’ me constant for further particulars about Olaf an’ Kit. “Horace,” sez I finally, “did you ever see these folks?”
“I never did,” sez he.
“Then,” sez I, “what you got again’ ’em ’at you want ’em to marry?”
“Marriage,” sez he with the recklessness common to old bachelors, “is the proper condition under which humans should live—and besides, I don’t like what you tell about Ty Jones.”
From that on, Horace began to talk hunt; and when Horace talked anything, he was as hard to forget as a split lip. He had brought out some rifles which the clerk had told him would kill grizzlies on sight, and Horace had an awful appetite to wipe out the memory o’ that woodchuck.
I admit that no one has any right to be surprised at anything some one else wants to do; but I never did get quite hardened to Horace Walpole Bradford. When ya looked at him, ya knew he was a middle-aged man with side-burn whiskers; but when ya listened to his talk, he sounded like a fourteen-year-old boy who had run away to slaughter Injuns in wholesale quantities.
All of his projecs were boyish; he purt’ nigh had his backbone bucked up through the peak of his head before he’d give in that ridin’ mean ones was a trade to itself; and the same with ropin’, and several other things. It ground him bitter because his body hadn’t slipped back as young as his mind, an’ he worked at it constant, tryin’ to make it so.
He wore black angora chaps, two guns, silver spurs, rattlesnake hat-band, Injun-work gauntlets, silk neckerchief through a silver slip, leather wristlets, an’ as tough an expression as he could work up; but the one thing of his old life he refused to discard was his side-burns. Sometimes he’d go without shavin’ for two weeks, an’ we’d all think he was raisin’ a beard; but one day he’d catch sight of himself in a lookin’-glass, an’ then he’d grub out the new growth an’ leave the hedge to blossom in all its glory.