A Man-Sized Pet
by W. C. Tuttle
Author of “Magpie’s Nightbear,” “A Bull Movement in Yellow Horse,” etc.
It was an incongruous group that sat around the rough pine table in Magpie Simpkins’s cabin, and played pitch by the light of an old smoky kerosene lamp.
Magpie Simpkins, six feet two, slender to the point of emaciation, with the face of a scholar above his walrus-like mustache, sat there peering at his cards through the only pair of glasses on Sleeping Creek.
Magpie had been to Missoula a short time before and at the earnest solicitation of an optician had purchased a pair of glasses, sans bows, which he fastened to his person through the medium of a wide silk ribbon. At the present time he wore the ribbon around his neck for safety.
Tellurium Woods, the second of the trio, was as fat as any outdoor man could ever expect to be, and his bald head and luxuriant brown beard gave one the impression of looking at a billiard ball on a rug. Tellurium affected buckskin shirts of his own manufacture and design, and it was impossible to tell, at the neck, just where the shirt left off and the skin began.
Bantie Weyman was the exact opposite of the others. He was about five feet two inches in height and would weigh about a hundred. He had a soprano voice, a gold tooth, and took baths. In the latter he differed from any one else on the range.
Bantie wasn’t exactly a man’s man but he did a man’s work on his claim in Bear Gulch and claimed to be the champion sourdough bread-maker of the world. Bantie was timid—so timid that he wouldn’t pack a gun, and the only armament of his cabin consisted of a .22 rifle with a section of cleaning-rod broken off inside the barrel.