a girl when two gents ask her for the same dance.

"'I'm plumb out of practice,' he says. 'Anyways, I guess I been talking
too much. You'll have to excuse me, Shorty!'

"And he meant it. He wasn't talking guff. Didn't seem possible anybody
could shoot as fast and straight as that, but Perris was all cut up
because he'd missed and he didn't do no more singing for about half an
hour. And I needed that time for a lot of thinking. Made up my mind that
if anybody wanted to make trouble for Perris they could count me out of
the party.

"And he kept on singing, when he started again, all the way to the ranch
and me wondering when I was going to go to sleep and fall off. I tried
to make talk. Seen a queer looking fob he wore for his watch pocket.
Asked him where he got it.

"'Tell you about it,' he says. 'Comes from me being plumb peaceable.' I
remembered some of the things I'd heard about Red Perris in Glosterville
and didn't say nothing. I just swallowed hard and took a squint at a
cloud. 'Four or five years back,' he says, 'when they was more liquor
and ambition floating around these parts, I was up in a little
cross-roads saloon in Utah, near Gunterville. Saloon was pretty jammed
with folks, all strangers to me. I wasn't packing a gun. Never do when I'm
in a crowd, if I can help it. Well, I got into a little game of stud, and
things were running pretty easy for me when a big gent across the table
that had been losing hard and drinking hard ups and says he allows I
sure have the cards talking. It sort of riled me. I tell him pretty
liberal what I think of him and all like him. I go back into the past
and give him a nice little description all about his ancestors. I aim to
wind up with an invite to step outside and have it out with fists, but
he don't wait. Right in the middle of my sermon he outs with a gat and
blazes away at me. The slug drills me in the thigh and I go down.

"'Well, this is the slug. And I been wearing it to remind me that I
particular want to meet up with that same gent before he gets too old
for a gunfight!'"

Here Shorty paused and sighed, shaking his bullet-head. And a deep
murmur of appreciation passed around the room. Shorty sank back again on
the bunk and turned his broad back on the crowd.

"Don't nobody wake me for chuck," he warned them. "I've just finished
cramming a month into four days and I got a night off coming."

Instantly his snoring began but it was some moments before anyone sp