he's going through. And she says she only come here because she knew I
wanted to!" says he.

"What's the difference?" I ast him. "We fooled her, didn't we?"

"Maybe," says he. "I ain't shore."

Well, anyway, this is what we'd swapped the old days out on the Yellow
Bull for. We'd done traded the mountains and the valley and the things
we knew for this three or four rooms at several hundred dollars a month
in a hotel that looked out over the water, and over a lot of people on
the keen lope, not one of them caring a damn for us--leastways not for
her pa or me.

III

US LIVING IN TOWN

I never had lived in town this long, not in all my life before, and, far
as I know, the boss hadn't, neither. We wasn't used to this way of
living. We'd been used to riding some every day. Out in the parks, even
in the winter, once in a while you could see somebody riding--or
thinking they was riding, which they wasn't.

One day Old Man Wright, come spring, he goes down to the stockyards and
buys a good saddle horse for Bonnie Bell to ride. It cost him
twenty-five dollars a month to keep that horse, so he would eat his head
off in about three months at the outside. Old Man Wright tells me that
I'll have to ride out with the kid whenever she wanted to go. That
suited me. Of course that meant we had to buy another horse for me. That
made the stable bill fifty dollars a month. I never did know what we
paid for our rooms at the hotel, but it was more every month than would
keep a family a year in Wyoming.

Bonnie Bell she could ride a man's saddle all right, and she had a
outfit for it. When it got a little warmer in the spring we used to go
in the parks every once in a while. One day we rid on out into a narrow
sort of place along the lake. There was houses there--a row of them, all
big, all of stone or brick; houses as big as the penitentiary in Wyoming
and about as cheerful.

We stopped right in front of a big brick-and-stone house, which had
trees and flower beds and hedges all along; and says she:

"Curly, how would you like to live in a house like that?"

"I wouldn't live in the damn place if you give it to me, Bonnie Bell,"
says I, cheerful.

She looked at me kind of funny.

"That's the kind of a house the best people have in this town," says
she. "For instance, that house we're looking at looks as though the best
architects in town had designed it. That place, Curly, cost anywhere
from a half to three-quarters of