.

Then I'd got to know about them iron things on his heels--spurs. We
threw peanuts, my knife agin his spurs, and he won easy. Queer how all
the time he's wanting to show himself off. He'd never seen salt water
before. The shipping, making the port, or clearing, foreign or
coastwise, the Hellafloat Yank, the Skowogian Coffin, the family packet,
liner, tramp, fisher, lumberman, geordie and greaser was all the same to
him. "Sounds like injun languages," says he, "can't you talk white?" So
we went in swimming, and afterward there's a lunch he'd got with
him--quart of pickled onions, and cigarettes. Seems it's the vacuum in
under which makes hearts feel so heavy.

This stranger begins to throw me horse talk and cow stories. It seems
cow-punchers is sort of sailors of the plains, only it's different.
Seafaring men gets wet and cold, and wrecked, but cow-boys has
adventures instead, excitement, red streaks of life. Following the sea,
I been missing life. Why, this guy ain't more'n two years older'n
me--say, seventeen, but he's had five years ridin' for one man, four
years for another, six years in Arizona, then three in Oregon, until
he's added up about half a century. He's more worldly, too, than
me--been in a train on the railroad. I'm surely humbled by four P. M.,
and if he keeps goin', by four bells I'll be young enough to set in
mother's lap.

Says his name's Bull Durham. Surely I seen that name on lil' sacks of
tobacco. Bull owns up this baccy's named after his father. And surely
his old man must be pretty well fixed. "That's so," says Bull, blushing
to show he's modest "Ye see, kid, the old man's a bishop. Yes, Bishop of
Durham, of course. Lives over to London, England. Got a palace thar, and
a pew in the House of Lords. I'll be a lord when he quits. I'm the
Honorable Bull by rights, although I hate to have the boys in camp know
that--make 'em feel real mean when all of 'em rides as well as me, or
almost, and some can rope even better."

"And you is the young of a real lord!"

"Sure. I'll have to be a bishop, too, when I comes into the property.
I'm a sort of vice-bishop, sonny. D'ye see these yere gloves? They got a
string to tie 'em at the back, 'cause I been inducted. I got an entail
I'll show you in camp, and a pair of hereditaments."

"Vice-bishop," says I, "is that like bo's'n's mate? I never hear tell of
a bishop's mate."

"He mates in two moves," says Bull, "baptism and conflamation."

"But," says I,