Yeager got up and stretched his supple body in a yawn. "That's all right. Just making up the sleep I lost last night on the road. No matter a-tall."
He was in blue overalls, the worn shiny chaps tossed across the back of a chair. On the table lay the dusty, pinched-in hat, through the disreputable crown of which Farrar had lately seen a lock of his brindle hair rising like an aigrette.
"Glad to have you join us. We need riders like you. Say, it was worth five dollars to me to see the way you laid out Harrison."
The cowpuncher's boyish face clouded.
"I'm right sorry about that. It ce'tainly was a fool play. I don't blame Harrison for getting sore."
"He's sore all right. That's what I came to see you about. He's a rowdy, Harrison is. And he'll make you trouble."
"Most generally I don't pack a gun," Yeager observed casually.
"It won't be a gun play; not to start with, anyhow. He used to be a prizefighter. He'll beat you up."
"Well, it don't hurt a man's system to absorb a licking once in a blue moon."
The cowpuncher said it smilingly, with a manner of negligent competence that came from an experience of many dangers faced, of many perilous ways safely trodden.