"Sit down, you lazy, hog-breeding son-of-a-gun and have a cigar," said the lawyer. "How are those emaciated razor-backs doing on that run-down farm of yours?"
"Getting fatter and sassier every week," said Stud, biting off the tip of the cigar and scratching a match on the seat of his trousers. "What you been up to?"
"Just the usual day. Forging checks and foreclosing on octogenarians. Where've you been keeping yourself?"
"Anywhere the fish are biting. There ain't much work to be done on a farm in the spring time."
"Need a good hand?"
"Maybe you could do my whittling," Stud said. "Anyhow it's a standing invitation."
"Might teach you how to raise hogs instead of razor-backs. Might breed you some beeves you could tell from bags of bones."
"Who'd you find to defraud your clients meanwhile?" Stud asked. "Where would you find a man to run your shell game while you was gone?"
The two old cronies glowered at each other joyfully and let fly at the nearest gobboon simultaneously and accurately, a symphony in expectoration which had taken nearly thirty years to perfect.
Their talk ran on: the spring floods in Ohio and Indiana, the price of hogs, milk, and eggs, the new trailer factory which was to occupy the old wagon-works on the creek bottom, President Wilson and his professorial theories, the German Kaiser and his fight to remove one of his tenant farmers, the ridiculous little Balkan squabbles.