"Here, Dilly"--to save the life of him he could not refrain from addressing him so--"why in thunder didn't yuh kick me awake, and make me get off your bed? What did yuh let me do it for--and you setting up all night--oh, this is sure a hell of a note!" Mr. Dill opened his eyes, stared blankly and came back from his dreaming. "You were so--so impatient when I tried to get you up," he explained in a tired voice. "And you had a way of laying your hands on your revolver when I insisted. It seems you took me for a shepherd and were very unfriendly; so I thought it best to let you stay as you were, but I'm afraid you were not very comfortable. One can rest so much better between sheets. You would not," he added plaintively, "even permit me to take your boots off for you." Charming Billy sat down upon the edge of the bed, all tousled as he was, and stared abstractedly at Mr. Dill. Perhaps he had never before felt so utterly disgusted with himself, or realized so keenly his shortcomings. Not even the girl had humbled him so completely as had this long, lank, sinfully grammatical man from Michigan. "You've sure got me where I live, Dilly," he said slowly and haltingly, feeling mechanically for the makings of a smoke. "Charming Billy Boyle ain't got a word to say for himself. But if yuh ain't plumb sick and disgusted with the spectacle I've made uh myself, yuh can count on me till hell's a skating-rink. I ain't always thisaway. I do have spells when I'm some lucid." It was not much, but such as it was it stood for his oath of allegiance. Alexander P. Dill sat up straight, his long, bony fingers--which Billy could still mentally see gripping the necks of those two in the saloon--lying loosely upon the chair-arms. "I hope you will not mention the matter again," he said. "I realize that this is not Michigan, and that the temptations are--But we will not discuss it. I shall be very grateful for your friendship, and--" "Grateful!" snorted Billy, spilling tobacco on the strip of faded ingrain carpet before the bed. "Grateful--hell!" Mr. Dill looked at him a moment and there was a certain keen man-measuring behind the wistfulness. But he said no more about the friendship of Charming Billy Boyle, which was as well. That is why the two of them later sat apart on the sunny side of the hotel "office"--which was also a saloon--and talked of many things, but chiefly of the cattle industry as Montana knows it and of the hopes and the aims of Alexander P. Dill. Perhaps, also, that is why Billy breathed clean of whisky and had the bulk of his winter wages still unspent in his pocket. "Looks to me," he was saying between puffs, "like you'd uh stayed back where yuh knew the lay uh the land, instead uh drifting out here where it's all plumb strange to yuh."