“Yeah, that’s true,” sighed Honey. “I dunno why he did; and he never said.”
“Didn’t have no quarrel with the girl?”
“Oh, no! Aw, it was to be a big marriage. I was to be best man. I almost crippled myself for life, tryin’ to wear number six shoes.”
“You come eat now?” asked Wong Lee.
Honey sat down with them. Sleepy looked gloomily at Hashknife and reminded him gently that sugar was for the coffee, and not for the eggs.
Hashknife chuckled, but sobered quickly. The rain still pattered on the old roof and dripped off the eaves. It was warm in the kitchen.
“Five thousand dollars is a lot of money,” mused Hashknife, stirring his coffee with a fork. He had used the same fork to dip sugar from the bowl and did not seem to realise that it had all leaked out.
Sleepy knew the symptoms and groaned inwardly. Years of association with Hashknife had taught Sleepy to recognise the sudden moods of the tall cowboy. Trouble and mystery affected Hashknife as the scent of upland fowl affects a pointer.
Hashknife, in the days of his callow youth, had been known as George. His father, an itinerant minister in the Milk River country and head of a big family, had had little time or money to do more than just let this boy grow up. As soon as he was able to sit in a saddle he lived with the cowboys and became one of them.
Blessed with a balanced mind, possibly inherited from his father, who surely needed a balanced mind to make both ends meet, the boy struck out for himself, absorbing all kinds of knowledge, studying human nature. Eventually he drifted to the ranch, which gave him his nickname, and here he met the grinning Sleepy Stevens, whose baptismal name was David.