"Cur!" yells Bill. "Cur? Why you maul-headed, misshapen blotch on the face o' nature, what do you mean by callin' this dog a cur! I never saw this dog before to-day; but I'll bet ten to one that I can find out who his great-great-grandfather's great-great-grandfather was; an' I doubt if you know who your own father happened to be."
Bill was firin' at random o' course, but it looked as if he had hit somethin'. Frenchy was fair crazy. He pulled out his gun an' came chargin' down on us. Bill tried to get mine again, but I thought I'd better run it myself just then. I covered Frenchy, Frenchy covered Bill, an' the bull pup turned his back on us and looked down toward the depot, to see if his train was comin' back.
"Better put up your gun, Frenchy," I sez, soft as a wood dove, "or you'll get this office all mussed up."
Well, he knew me; so we arbitrated a little an' then we all went in an' the pup et his dinner like any other Christian, payin' for it himself out of his own money. First thing after dinner, Bill went out an' bought a gun of his own, an' I scented trouble. He wasn't old enough to shoot only from principle, not merely for practice.
The' was another young feller at Frenchy's with a lot o' hot money in his clothes. He seemed to have a deep-felt prejudice against fire, too, the way he was blowin' it in. When Bill came back, the young feller tried to buy the dog from him. Bill was polite an' refused to sell, givin' as the main reason that the dog didn't fully belong to him yet, but the feller pestered around until finally he offered Bill two hundred dollars for the dog.
"You ain't no fool when it comes to a dog," sez Bill, "but I'm givin' you the honest truth. This here pup don't belong to me—though if I can buy him I sure intend to do it."
"How far would you go when it came to payin' for him?" sez the man.
"Well, I'd give two fifty for him just on speculation," sez Bill. "He's put together, this pup is; but I didn't suppose 'at you people out here in the cattle country would know enough about the points of a dog, to offer two hundred for just a fancy one."
"I don't know nothin' about the points o' that dog," sez the feller. "I never even saw a dog like that one before; but when I see a man willin' to go the pace you went for this dog, I'd kind o' sort o' like to own the dog."
Bill got interested in the feller an' began pumpin' him for what he called copy. The young feller had punched cattle most of his life, blowin' in his wages at variegated intervals. About a month before he had slipped over to Laramie an' had gone against Silver Dick's game, winnin' over eleven hundred dollars. He said that Silver Dick was plumb on the square an' that he never intended to work again, just spend down to his last hundred an' then go an' play at Silver Dick's. Bill got a paper an' figured out what he called percents, showin' how an outsider was bound to lose to the game in the end; but most o' the fellers there had been up against Dick's game an' they took sides against Bill, tryin' to prove that they stood a show to win, until finally Bill give it up an' we started back home.