The irony in his voice was lost on DeRue Hannington who was too full of his own troubles to worry about those of anyone else.
“Well, you see,––when the dad and I had that tiff, I just took him on.
“I saw an advertisement of a rawnching chap in a London journal, offering to take on an Englishman as an apprentice and teach him everything about rawnching for three years for five hundred dollars a year. I just cabled that fellow and got his answer to come right away. And here I got three months ago.”
All the time he was speaking, Hannington was eating ravenously but with the ease and daintiness of one whose table manners were an eternal part of him.
“The rawncher met me at the station with two horses. Not a blessed wagon or a thing to carry my luggage did the bounder have. It is lying at the station yet;––at least it was last time I called in there. The fellow took my five hundred dollars, then took me twenty miles up over these everlasting hills. A thousand miles in the bally wilderness!
“Of course, you know, Phil, I will admit I was deuced raw.”
Phil laughed. DeRue Hannington’s good nature asserted itself and he laughed, too.
After a while, he went on.
“This rawnching Johnnie’s name was Duff. You don’t happen to know him?”