Swing, sapient young person, walked casually to the window and watched Luke Tweezy cross the street to Calloway’s store.  Then he returned to Racey’s table.  Racey turned his tousled head sidewise and whispered from a corner of his mouth, “Help me out to Tom Kane’s stable.  He’s out o’ town, and there won’t anybody bother us.”

“C’mon, Racey, come alive,” urged Swing Tunstall, making a great business of shaking awake his drunken friend.  “You don’t wanna stay here no longer.  I know a fine place where you can sleep it off.”

Ten minutes later Racey and Swing were sitting comfortably on a pile of hay in Tom Kane’s new stable.  Racey pulled off his boots, flopped down on the hay, and clasped his hands behind his head.  He wiggled his toes luxuriously and laughed.

“Gawd,” said he.  “Think o’ that old skinflint buying nearly two bottles of whiskey!  Bet that’ll lay heavy on his mind for as much as a month.  What you lookin’ at me like that for?”

“Yeah, I’d ask if I was you.  I shore would.  What was yore bright idea of tellin’ Luke Tweezy we were gonna ride for Jack Harpe so’s to watch him?”

“So he’d know it.”

“So he’d know it!  So he’d know it!  The man sits there and says ’so he’d know it’!  And you call me a thickskull!  Which yore head has got mine snowed under thataway.  Can’t you see, you droolin’ fool, that now they’ll know as much as we do?”

“No, oh, no,” Racey denied with a superior smile.  “Not never a-tall.  I ain’t saying they mightn’t know as much as you do by yoreself.  But not while you got the benefit of my brains they won’t know as much as we do.  ’Tain’t possibil.”

“And what did you bite me for?” pursued Swing, disregarding the slur.  “Hell’s bells, if you’d bit Luke I wouldn’t have a word to say, but why pick on me?”

“Well, you bumped my head so hard I saw sparks, so we’re even.  Say, stop squallin’ about yore hand!  I didn’t bite you half as hard as I might have.  Not half.  You can still use the hand all right, can’t you?  Yeah.  Well, then, you ain’t got anything to cry about, not a thing.”

“Talk sense, will you?  You got us into a fine mess, you have.  A fi-ine mess.”

“Guess I fooled him, all right,” Racey said with irritating complacency.

“What was you trying to do, anyway?” Swing snarled, glaring at his friend.  “What was the notion of tearin’ off all them confidences about bein’ busted and yore dear friends at the Bar S and how you and me was gonna play detective?  And to think Providence lets a what-you-may-call-it like you go on living!  It ain’t reasonable.”

“That business of telling Luke we was busted,” grinned Racey, “and asking him for a loan was just so I could work up roundabout and natural like to how the Bar S bunch was my personal friends and how we were gonna ride for Jack Harpe and watch him on their account.  I wanted him to know those things, and I couldn’t slam out and tell him dry so, could I?  It wouldn’t sound natural.  It would make him think the wrong way, you bet.  Luke Tweezy ain’t a plumb fool, for all he made the mistake of denying he knowed Jack Harpe.  That was a bad one.”