“Yeah. Give me the money for the ticket.” “By grab, Chuck, you and me are friends for life. Here’s twenty. I don’t know what the ticket costs, but I ain’t asking questions. If she asks for me, you tell her—what’ll you tell her?” “I never rehearse, Doughgod. I’ll tell her something—you gamble on that.” Doughgod wanders away, hugging himself, so me and Chuck buys a drink. We meets “Muley” Bowles and “Telescope” Tolliver, and Chuck tells them about the trustee meeting. “That’s a danged shame,” states Telescope. “This here country is pining for the touch of a woman’s gentle hand. Now, when she shows up, we got to tell her to pilgrim along. Just ’cause them two old, dried-up specimens don’t want women, it ain’t no reason why we don’t.” “Dogs in a manger,” says Muley, shaking his fat face until it wobbles. Muley had had about enough cheer for a fat man, and he ain’t none too secure on his feet. “As the poet would shay: “Drink to me only with thy eyes, Oh, women, lovely women, If I hadn’t washed las’ Shummer I’d like to go in schwimmin’.” “Muley, you’re making light of a dark subject,” chides Telescope. “This is a case of two old pelicans trying to cut the sentiment out of the cow business, and we’ve got to frustrate it. _Sabe?_” “Shentiment?” asks Muley serious-like. “This is my shentiments: “Love is a fleeting flower That fleeted away from me, Like a tumble-weed in a cyclone Adrift on a Wintry sea. Where are the loves of yesterday That made my heart so light? Gone like the howl of a coyote That was howled at the moon last night. “That’s shentiment,” says Muley. “Deep from the heart. Who’s going to the dance at the Triangle tonight, eh?” “Dances is secondary to the main issue,” says Telescope judicial-like, “and poetry is incidental. We must contemplate deep and act as our better natures dictates.” Muley Bowles is a self-made poet. Something inside that two-hundred-and-forty-pound carcass seems to move him to rime, and nothing can stop him. He’s so heavy in a saddle that all of his broncs are bowed in the legs and run their shoes over awful. Telescope Tolliver came from down in the moonshine belt, and he’s got some strange and awful ideas of what constitutes a code of honor. He’s so long in the legs that a bronc has to pitch twice at the same time to get him high enough to throw. Chuck Warner is a Roman-nosed puncher, with the shortest legs on record and the trusting eyes of a bird-dog. According to all we can find out, Chuck is a titled person. Of course, being an ordinary puncher, he don’t wish to have folks know him as anything but just plain Chuck, but the title remains just the same—Ananias the Second. I won’t go so far as to say that he can’t tell the truth, but I will insist that he won’t. Me—I’m Henry Clay Peck. I play the banjo cheerfully, take my baths on the same day of every month and do what I’m told. I can’t blame nor credit anybody but me for what I am.