perfect harmony, and might have done so if he had been a little more foolish than he looked. Other young men from the farm country had made that mistake when they invaded the range. They never deceived anybody, and sometimes experienced a good deal of grief for their pretense.
Bill stood among them, half a dozen or more in the crowd, uncomfortable and somewhat uneasy, trying to grin and pass it off for the joke the best natured among them intended it to be. But there always is a more or less well developed bully among half a dozen boys who gang together, and these prairie rangers were not much above the average twelve-year-old lad in mental development. There was a bully among them; he came to the front now, a tall, shanky fellow with calves so long his boots reached only half-way to his knees. He had been shaved and clipped but a few minutes before, the scraped portion of his face clean in contrast to the rest of his unwashed surface apparent to the eye, and he smelled violently of barbarous perfume. This fellow now asserted himself as director of the entertainment.
There were no street lights in Pawnee Bend in those days, the sidewalks being illuminated by the lights of store fronts, the general custom being to place a lamp with tin reflector in the window, on the principle, perhaps, that light attracted night-roaming creatures, rather than through any design of making passage through the streets more comfortable.
Everything kept open late at night in that town, with the possible exception of the lumber yard. Bill
