ed to know or
care. He never asked Bud any questions about his private affairs, never
seemed to care how Bud had lived, or where. And Bud thankfully left his
past behind the wall of silence. So he had come to believe that he was
almost as emotion-proof as Cash appeared to be, and had let it go at
that.

Now here he was, with his heart and his mind full of Marie--after more
than a year and a half of forgetting her! Getting drunk and playing
poker all night did not help him at all, for when he woke it was from a
sweet, intimate dream of her, and it was to a tormenting desire for her,
that gnawed at his mind as hunger gnaws at the stomach. Bud could not
understand it. Nothing like that had ever happened to him before. By all
his simple rules of reckoning he ought to be "over it" by now. He had
been, until he saw that picture.

He was so very far from being over his trouble that he was under it; a
beaten dog wincing under the blows of memory, stung by the lash of his
longing. He groaned, and Frank thought it was the usual "morning after"
headache, and laughed ruefully.

"Same here," he said. "I've got one like a barrel, and I didn't punish
half the booze you did."

Bud did not say anything, but he reached for the bottle, tilted it and
swallowed three times before he stopped.

"Gee!" whispered Frank, a little enviously.

Bud glanced somberly across at Frank, who was sitting by the stove with
his jaws between his palms and his hair toweled, regarding his guest
speculatively.

"I'm going to get drunk again," Bud announced bluntly. "If you don't
want to, you'd better duck. You're too easy led--I saw that last night.
You follow anybody's lead that you happen to be with. If you follow my
lead to-day, you'll be petrified by night. You better git, and let me go
it alone."

Frank laughed uneasily. "Aw, I guess you ain't all that fatal, Bud.
Let's go over and have some breakfast--only it'll be dinner."

"You go, if you want to." Bud tilted the bottle again, his eyes half
closed while he swallowed. When he had finished, he shuddered violently
at the taste of the whisky. He got up, went to the water bucket and
drank half a dipper of water. "Good glory! I hate whisky," he grumbled.
"Takes a barrel to have any effect on me too." He turned and looked down
at Frank with a morose kind of pity. "You go on and get your breakfast,
kid. I don't want any. I'll stay here for awhile."

He sat down on the side of the cheap, iron bedste