“Always takes some soft-handed dude to make a winning with a fool girl,” he comforted himself.

He expected the arrival of Jerry Bent before nightfall, and with that arrival, perhaps, there would be a new sort of attack on him.  Sally and Cold Feet were trying persuasion, but they might encourage Jerry Bent to attempt physical force.  With all his heart Riley Sinclair hoped so.  He had a peculiar desire to do something significant for the eyes of both Sally and Jig.

But nightfall came, and then supper, and still no Jerry appeared.  Afterward, Sinclair made ready to sleep in Jig’s room.  Cold Feet offered him the couch.

“Beds and me don’t hitch” declared Riley, throwing two or three of the rugs together.  “I ain’t particular partial to a floor, neither, but these here rugs will give it a sort of a ground softness.”

He sat cross-legged on the low pile of rugs, while he pulled off his boots and smoked his good-night cigarette.  Jig coiled up in a big chair, while he studied his jailer.

“But how can you go to bed so early?” he asked.

“Early?  It ain’t early.  Sun’s down, ain’t it?  Why do they bring on night, except for folks to go to sleep?”

“For my part the best part of the day generally begins when the sun goes down.”

With patient contempt Riley considered John Gaspar.  “You look kind of that way,” he decided aloud.  “Pale and not much good with your shoulders.  Now, what d’you most generally do with your time in the evening?”

“Why—­talk.”

“Talk?  Huh!  A fine way of wasting time for a growed-up man.”

“And I read, you know.”

“I can see by the looks of them shelves that you do.  How many of them books might you have read, Jig?”

“All of them.”

“I ask you, man to man, ain’t they mostly somebody’s idea of what life is?”

“I suppose that’s a short way of putting it.”

“And I ask you ag’in, what’s better to take a secondhand hunch out of what somebody else thinks life might be, or to go out and do some living on your own hook?”

Cold Feet had been smiling faintly up to this point, as though he had many things in reserve which might be said at need.  Now his smile disappeared.

“Perhaps you’re right.”

“And maybe I ain’t.”  Sinclair brushed the entire argument away into a thin mist of smoke.  “Now, look here, Cold Feet, I’m about to go to sleep, and when I sleep, I sure sleep sound, taking it by and large.  They’s times when I don’t more’n close one eye all night, and they’s times when you’d have to pull my eyes open, one by one, to wake me up.  Understand?  I’m going to sleep the second way tonight.  About eight hours of the soundest sleep you ever heard tell of.”

Jig considered him gravely.

“I’m afraid,” he answered, “that I won’t sleep nearly as well.”

Riley Sinclair smiled.  “Wouldn’t be no ways nacheral for you to do much sleeping,” he agreed.  “Take a gent that’s in danger of having his neck stretched, like you, and most generally he don’t do much sleeping.  He lies around awake, cussing his luck, I s’pose.  Take you, now, Cold Feet, and I s’pose you’ll be figuring on how far a hoss could carry you in the eight hours that I’ll be sleeping.  Eh?”