'm givin'
you the honest truth. This here pup don't belong to me--though if I can
buy him I sure intend to do it."

"How far would you go when it came to payin' for him?" sez the man.

"Well, I'd give two fifty for him just on speculation," sez Bill. "He's
put together, this pup is; but I didn't suppose 'at you people out here
in the cattle country would know enough about the points of a dog, to
offer two hundred for just a fancy one."

"I don't know nothin' about the points o' that dog," sez the feller. "I
never even saw a dog like that one before; but when I see a man willin'
to go the pace you went for this dog, I'd kind o' sort o' like to own
the dog."

Bill got interested in the feller an' began pumpin' him for what he
called copy. The young feller had punched cattle most of his life,
blowin' in his wages at variegated intervals. About a month before he
had slipped over to Laramie an' had gone against Silver Dick's game,
winnin' over eleven hundred dollars. He said that Silver Dick was plumb
on the square an' that he never intended to work again, just spend down
to his last hundred an' then go an' play at Silver Dick's. Bill got a
paper an' figured out what he called percents, showin' how an outsider
was bound to lose to the game in the end; but most o' the fellers there
had been up against Dick's game an' they took sides against Bill,
tryin' to prove that they stood a show to win, until finally Bill give
it up an' we started back home.

When we started home, Bill was still discoursin' about us Westerners.
He said that we wasn't nothin' but a lot o' children playin' games an'
believin' in fairy tales, that we never provided for the future, that
we was allus willin' to risk anything we had on some fool thing that
wouldn't benefit us none, an' so on until I got weary of it, an' after
I'd took a shuffle I dealt him out this hand.

"An' the''s another breed," sez I, "that ain't nothin' but children an'
that's the writers. An idea comes along an' stings 'em like a bee, an'
they immejetly begin to swell. They swell an' swell until the whole
earth ain't nothin' but the background for that bee-sting. They howl
about it as if it was the most important thing in creation; but if you
call around next week, you find that swellin' gone down an' they're
howlin' just as fierce over a new swellin' where a different idea has
stung 'em; ain't it so?"

"Not exactly," sez Bill; "for we set down our thoughts an' emotions
while