hard-working Hopalong. "It was plum lucky fer yu that they was
acourtin' that time, wasn't it, Hopalong?" suddenly asked Red.
Hopalong nearly strangled in his efforts to speak. He gave it
up and nodded his head.

"Why can't yu git it straight, Connors? I wasn't doin' no courtin',
it was Pete. I runned into him on th' other side o' th' pass. I'd look
fine acourtin', wouldn't I?" asked the downtrodden Williams.

Pete Wilson skillfully flipped a potato into that worthy's coffee,
spilling the beverage of the questionable name over a large expanse of
blue flannel shirt. "Yu's all right, yu are. Why, when I meets yu, yu
was lost in th' arms of yore ladylove. All I could see was yore feet.
Go an' git tangled up with a two hundred and forty pound half-breed
squaw an' then try to lay it onter me! When I proposed drownin' yore
troubles over at Cowan's, yu went an' got mad over what yu called th'
insinooation. An' yu shore didn't look any too blamed fine, neither."

"All th' same," volunteered Thompson, who had taken the edge from
his appetite, "we better go over an' pay C 80 a call. I don't like
what Shorty said about saltin' our cattle. He'll shore do it, unless I
camps on th' line, which same I hain't hankerin' after."

"Oh, he wouldn't stop th' cows that way, Skinny; he was only
afoolin'," exclaimed Connors meekly.

"Foolin' yore gran'mother! That there bunch'll do anything if we
wasn't lookin'," hotly replied Skinny.

"That's shore nuff gospel, Thomp. They's sore fer mor'n one thing.