“You living alone?” I asks.
“You don’t count, Ike. A man like me kinda pines for the soft things of life.”
“Mush?”
“Mush! Naw-w-w! Always thinkin’ of your belly, Ike. A woman don’t mean nothin’ to you.”
“I don’t mean nothin’ to her, Magpie; so it’s fifty-fifty. Have you gone and fell into love again? Why, you danged old gray-backed pack-rat!”
“Age ain’t no barrier to happiness, Ike. It ain’t kind of you to point out a man’s failin’s thataway. Love knows no barriers.”
“Nor nothin’ else, Magpie.”
Magpie Simpkins is about six feet and a half in his socks, and he’s built on the principle of the thinnest line between two points. He’s just got hips enough to hold up his cartridge-belt—if he’s careful. His face is long and his mustaches look plumb exhausted from just hanging down past his mouth. His mind is full of odds and ends that never fit into anything.
A ordinary man in love can be handled, but Magpie ain’t ordinary. Love is quicksand and no help in sight to that hombre. I’ve herded him past several affairs of the heart, liver, and lungs, but each time the attack is harder. The D. T’s are a cinch beside what that pelican suffers when the little fat god of love stings him with a poisoned arrow.
Mostly always I hangs a extra gun to my belt and fills my pockets with rocks. Listen to reason? Say, that feller’s ears don’t hear nothin’ but “love, honor and obey”—that, and the church bells ringing.