"But what?" "Oh--nothin'," said Jim Burns. "Come on, now, Jim,--tell us. What's wrong with Bill?" "Well," Jim Burns flung out an expressive hand, "I could have had Daise myself, if he hadn't took her." Dex Coleman tilted back his head and laughed till the barn rang. Jim Burns got up slowly off the oat-box and commenced to take off his coat. "Come on," he said, "if you want a fight. I'll push your nose out through the back of your head, if you laugh at me that way, Coleman." Coleman sobered, and slapped the other on the back. "I ain't laughin' at you, boy," he said; "don't you ever think it. It was myself I was laughin' at. I wanted her too, Jim, them days. But we both went at it the wrong way. You said nothin' at all to her, and I said too much. Bill goes about it in the right way, and he gets the girl. Bill's a gentleman." "Well," demanded Burns, "ain't we gentlemen, too? I am, anyway, and I have a poke in the jaw for any man that says I ain't." "That," rejoined Dex Coleman, "is one son of a moose of a way to prove to a man that you're a _gentleman_. The trouble with us out in this section of the country, Jim, is that, some way, we seem to have the idea in the back of our heads that a gentleman is a man who's got either money enough or nerve enough to sport around in a tailor-made suit and not do any work. That's the reason each of us is so sensitive about his claim to the title: because we think the man who says 'you're no gentleman' sees us as day-laborers and himself as our wealthy or nervy neighbor who don't have to work. Jim, this gentleman thing is inside of you--not outside. I've learned that much from workin' alongside of Bill, anyway.... Here comes Milt. Well, Milt, did they let you see it?" "It ain't a 'it', boys," said Milt Hayes, "it's a him." "Three cheers!" shouted Dex Coleman; "how did the old lady take it?" "Oh, carried it kind of easy, in a shawl so clean-white it pretty near blinded you," replied Milt Hayes, staring; "why, how did you suppose she'd take it? By the scruff of the neck?" "I don't mean the baby," explained Dex Coleman, "I mean the news." "It wasn't no news to her," responded the other vaguely, "she brung him downstairs herself, I'm tellin' you." "Oh, go to blazes!" exclaimed Dex Coleman, jumping off the oat-box, "boys, I'm goin' up to the house. I'll get in, sir, if I have to massacree that city doctor to do it." "Ast how Daise is," called Jim Burns after Coleman as he went out, "we don't care about whether the old lady likes the baby or lumps it." It was not long till tall, good-looking and still somewhat "nervy" Dex Coleman came whooping back to the barn with the word, "I bunted past the doctor, fellows--never even let on I knew he was there--and spoke right up to Lady Frances herself. She says all you boys may come right up and have a look at the baby." "I guess we _may_," said Jim Burns, as he followed the speaker out through the door; "it's Daise's baby, not hers."