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