“So did I. That tall feller ain’t nobody’s fool. Me and him sets down on the sidewalk, and it ain’t more’n five minutes before I finds m’self tellin’ him all about you and Angel and Lila. Fact. Yuh hadn’t ought to wear a shirt so long, Rance. Not over six weeks, at the outside.
“I dunno what this Hartley wanted to know so much for, and he didn’t tell me. He looks plumb through yuh. Three times I started to lie to him—and quit. He talked with Angel. Yeah, he told me he had. Jim Parker took sort of a likin’ to him and his pardner and invited them up to supper. I heard that Stevens won two hundred dollars at the Red Arrow Saloon the other day.
“I’ll never git that neck-band clean, Rance. If you’d wash yore neck once in a while——”
“What did this Hartley person want to know?” interrupted Rance.
“Oh, jist a few things. F’r instance, he wanted to know how it comes that you have seventy-five hundred dollars, win close to eight thousand more—and then have to borrow money from the bank.”
Chuckwalla sloshed the shirt around in the water and held it off at arm’s length, looking at it critically. Old Rance peered at Chuckwalla, his grizzled eyebrows almost concealing his eyes.
“He asked yuh that, did he?” coldly.
“Shore.”
“What did yuh say?”
“Nothin’. What could I say? I didn’t know yuh did, Rance.”