now he did not know what name to call her—­was showing a strain of coarse temper; the temper that must descend to personalities and the calling of unflattering names.  Weary, not being that type of male human who can retort in kind, sat helpless and speechless the while she berated him.  When at last he found opportunity for closing the interview and riding on, her anger-sharpened voice followed him shrewishly afar.  Weary breathed deep relief when the distance swallowed it, and lifted his gray hat to wipe his beaded forehead.

“Mamma mine!” he said fervently to Glory.  “Irish was sure playing big luck when she did marry Spikes; and I don’t wonder at the poor devil taking to drink.  I would, too, if my little schoolma’am—­”

At the ranch, he hastened to make it quite plain that he was not Ira Mallory, but merely his cousin, Will Davidson.  He was quite determined to put a stop to all this annoying mixing up of identities.  And as for Spikes Weber, since meeting the woman Spikes claimed from him something very like sympathy; only Weary had no mind to stand calmly and hear Irish maligned by anybody.

The next day he rode again to Sleepy Trail to meet the stage, hoping fervently that he would get some word—­and that favorable—­from Chip.  He was thinking, just then, a great deal about his own affairs and not at all about the affairs of Irish.  So that he was inside the saloon before he remembered that the bartender knew him for Irish.

The bartender nodded to him in friendly fashion, and jerked his head warningly toward a far corner where two men sat playing seven-up half-heartedly.  Weary looked, saw that both were strangers, and puzzled a minute over the mysterious gesture of the bartender.  It did not occur to him, just then, that one of the men might be Spikes Weber.

The man who was facing him nipped the corners of the cards idly together and glanced up; saw Weary standing there with an elbow on the bar looking at him, and pushed back his chair with an oath unmistakably warlike.  Weary resettled his hat and looked mildly surprised.  The bartender moved out of range and watched breathlessly.

“You ---- ---- --------!” swore Spikes Weber, coming truculently
forward, hand to hip.   He was of medium height and stockily built, with
the bull neck and little, deep-set eyes that go often with a nature
quarrelsome.

Weary still leaned his elbow on the bar and smiled at him tolerantly.  “Feel bad anywhere?” he wanted to know, when the other was very close.

Spikes Weber, from very surprise, stopped and regarded Weary for a space before he began swearing again.  His hand was still at his hip, but the gun it touched remained in his pocket.  Plainly, he had not expected just this attitude.

Weary waited, smothering a yawn, until the other finished a particularly pungent paragraph.  “A good jolt uh brandy ’ll sometimes cure a bad case uh colic,” he remarked.  “Better have our friend here fix yuh up—­but it’ll be on you.  I ain’t paying for drinks just now.”