Telescope clears his throat, rolls a cigaret and glares at Chuck, who glares right back, and wiggles his ears.
“Look at them ears!” applauds Archibald. “I’d love to get a close-up of them.”
“Mister,” reproves Chuck, “it ain’t seemly that a stranger should set on top of a corral and make remarks about the physical failings of a native son. Keep on at the pace you’ve started, and that spell that Telescope spoke about can be spelled in four letters: g-o-n-e. Sabe?”
“You got a lot to say about it, now ain’t yuh?” reproves Telescope. “You ain’t nothing around here but a forty-dollar puncher. You got a lot of chance to tell visitors where to head in. Come on, Mister Ames, and we’ll go up and see the man what owns this ranch, and ain’t no more sense than to pay forty dollars to a runt like that.”
They climbs down and goes up to the ranch-house.
“Haw! Haw! Haw!” whoops Muley, shaking every ounce of his two hundred and forty pounds of bone and lard. “Haw! Haw! ‘Come on, Mister Ames, and we go up to see the man’—haw, haw, haw! You will tell folks where to head in at, will yuh?”
Muley is a poet. There might ’a’ been as good rhymers as him once upon a time, but they’re all dead and departed. Muley is the he-buzzard of the flock right now. He hangs on to the side of the corral and wipes the tears out of his eyes.
“Gosh!” he snorts. “Telescope sure showed his breeding, Chuck. Yuh could tell he’s been well raised. Sticks his chin up in the air, like a grouse with a goiter, and proclaims: ‘Come on with me, Mister Ames.’ Haw! Haw! Haw!”
“Some day I’m going to reach up and hang my fist on his jaw,” proclaims Chuck.
“You better catch him in bed or carry a ladder with yuh,” says I. “You got ambition, Chuck, but your height ain’t noways adequate.”