ying up the smoothest way to deceive.
I guess," he added artfully, and as if the subject was nearly
exhausted, "yuh don't know Mr. Green very well."

"I remember hearing about that job he put up on yuh," Take-Notice
remarked, not noticing that the girl's lips were opened for speech,
"Yuh made a stretcher, didn't yuh, and--"

"No--he told it that way, but he's such a liar he couldn't tell the
truth if he wanted to. We found him lying at the bottom of a steep
bluff, and he appeared to be about dead. It looked as if he'd slipped
and fallen down part way. So we packed water and sloshed in his face,
and he kinda come to, and then we packed him up the bluff--and yuh
know what the Bad-lands is like, Take-Notice. It was unmerciful hot,
too, and we like to died getting him up. At the top we laid him down
and worked over him till we got him to open his eyes, and he could
talk a little and said maybe he could ride if we could get him on a
horse. The--he made us _lift_ him into the saddle--and considering the
size of him, it was something of a contract--and then he made as if he
couldn't stay on, even. But first we knew he digs in the spurs, yanks
off his hat and lets a yell out of him you could hear a mile, and
says: 'Much obliged, boys, it was too blamed hot to walk up that
hill,' and off he goes."

Take-Notice stretched his legs out before him, pushed his hands deep
down in his trousers' pockets, and laughed and laughed. "That was sure
one on you," he chuckled. "Andy's a hard case, all right."

But the girl stood before him, a little pale and with her chin high.
"Father, how can you think it's funny?" she cried impatiently. "It
seems to me--er--I think it's perfectly horrid for a man to act like
that. And you say, Mr. Bates, that he's out there _now_"--she swept a
very pretty hand and arm toward the window--"acting the same silly
sort of falsehood?"

"I don't know where he is _now_," Jack answered judicially. "That's
what he was doing when we came past."

She went to the door and stood looking vaguely out at nothing in
particular, and Irish took the opportunity to kick Jack on the
ankle-bone and viciously whisper, "Yuh damned chump!" But Jack smiled
serenely. Irish, he reflected, had not been with them that day in the
Bad-lands, and so had not the same cause for vengeance. He remembered
that Irish had laughed, just as Take-Notice was laughing, when they
told him about it; but Jack had never been able to see the joke, and