“Yop,” he went on, ramming his quid into the angle of his jaw, “and he’s always admiring himself in the mirror, Racey is.  He pats his hair down, after partin’ it and usin’ enough goose-grease on it to keep forty guns from rusting for ten years, and he shines his boots with blacking, my stove-blacking, the rustling scoundrel.  Scrouge southwest a li’l more, Racey, and look at yore chin.  They’s a li’l speck of dust on it.  Oh, me, oh, my!  Li’l sweetheart will have to wash his face again.  Who is she?”

Still Racey did not deign to reply.  He placed, removed, and replaced a garnet stickpin in the necktie a dozen times handrunning.  Jimmie beat the long roll with his knuckles on the bottom of the frying-pan, and winked at the broad back of Racey Dawson.

“I hear they’s a new hasher at Bill Lainey’s hotel,” pursued the indefatigable Jimmie.  “Tim Page told me she only weighed three hundred pounds without her shoes.  It ain’t her!  Don’t tell me it’s her!  You ain’t, are you, Racey?”

Racey, pivoting on a spurred heel, faced Jimmie, stuck his arms akimbo, and spoke: 

“Not mentioning any names, of course, but there’s some people round here got an awful lot to say.  Which if a gent was to say their tongues are hung in the middle he’d be only tellin’ half the truth.  Not that you ain’t popular with me, James.  You are.  I think the world of you.  How can I help it when you remind me all the time of my aunt’s pet parrot in yore face and language.  Except you ain’t the right colour.  If yore whiskers had only grown out green.”

“We’re forgetting what we was talkin’ about,” tucked in Jimmie the cook, smiling sweetly.  “The lady, Racey.  Who is she?”

“James,” said Racey, his smile matching that of the cook, “they’s something about you to-day, something I don’t like.  I dunno the name for it exactly.  But if you’ll step inside the bunkhouse a minute, I’ll show you what I mean.  I’ll show you in two shakes.”

Jimmie shook a wise head and backed out into the open.  “Not while I got my health.  You come out here and show me.”

“Oh, I ain’t gonna play any tricks on you,” protested Racey Dawson.

“You bet you ain’t,” Jimmie concurred, warmly.  “Not by severial jugfuls.  I—­” He broke off, cocking a listening ear.

“Yeah,” grinned Racey, “you hear a noise in the cook-shack, huh?  I thought I saw the Kid slide past in the lookin’-glass while you were standing in the doorway.”

“And you never told me!” squalled Jimmie, speeding toward his beloved place of business.

He reached it rather late.  When he entered by the doorway the Kid, a pie in each hand, was disappearing through a back window.

“Did you ever get left!” tossed back the Kid as the flung frying-pan buzzed past his ear.—­“Now see what you done,” he continued, skipping safely out of range; “dented yore nice new frypan all up.  You oughtn’ta done that, Jimmie.  Fry-pans cost money.  Some day, if you ain’t careful, you’ll break something, you and yore temper.”