"Well, look at this granger with a gun hangin' on him!" said one. "Where do you think"—kindly patronizing—"you're goin' to, son?"
"Just amblin' around," Bill replied.
"Where's your ma?" the humorist of the bunch inquired, keeping up his pretense of benevolent interest.
Nobody laughed, every buck of them holding a face as sober and kindly concerned as he could pull, just as if they had found some little four-year-old wandering around on the prairie miles from anywhere. Bill's appearance, in comparison with their own, was fair warrant for their comical pretense, and without doubt as ridiculous as any get-up they were able to conceive.
Dunham's blue serge suit was neat, well-made and well-fitted; his round black hat of a pattern not unknown to Pawnee Bend, or even in legislative halls, a sort of senatorial, narrow-brimmed soft felt with a narrow tape around the crown where a ribbon usually is worn. But there was something unmistakably pertaining to business with the soil about him which appeared to make the gun under his coat a rare piece of burlesque.
Bill had seen hundreds—it might be said thousands, and still be well within the facts—of cow valets such as these pass the nursery on top of cattle trains in the many years he had labored beside the railroad there. Their wide-brimmed hats with high crowns, blue woolen, gray woolen, gay plaid woolen and dirty drab woolen shirts were as familiar to his eyes as print. He knew their accouterments from spur to wrist-strap; he could have outfitted himself to fit the new scene with
