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"Say, there!" his callous employer called after him. "Why don't you get Boogles to embroider that name of yours on the front of your shirt? He'd adore to do it. And you can still read, can't you, in the midst of your agonies?" There was no response to this taunt. The suffering one faded slowly down the path to the bunk house and was lost in its blackness.
"But if it ain't a stepmother then it's somebody else that beans you. A guy in this burg is always getting knocked round by somebody." "Read some more of the novel," pleaded Boogles, to change the distressing topic. Jimmie drew a tattered paper romance from the pocket of his faded coat and pushed the cap back from his seamed old forehead.
I must have the free, wild life of the plains, the canter after the Texas steers, and the fierce battles with my peers. For me the boundless, the glorious West!" "Chee! It must be something grand that wild life!" interrupted Boogles. "That's the real stuff the cowboy and trapper on them peraries, hunting bufflers and Injuns. I seen a film " Jimmie Time frowned at this.
A block away from the office he encountered Jimmie Time, who seemed to await him importantly. He seethed with excitement. "I got one, too!" he called. "That tank drama he sent another note uptown to a restaurant where a party was, and he give me a case note, too." He revealed it; and when Boogles withdrew his own treasure the two were lovingly compared and admired.
On a shaded bench by the spring house, a plaid golfing cap pushed back from one-half the amazing area of his bare pate, sat the aged chore-boy, Boogles, and knitted. The ranch was on a war basis. And more: As I came abreast of the bunk house the Sabbath calm was punctured by the tart and careless speech of Sandy Sawtelle, a top rider of the Arrowhead, for he, too, was knitting, or had been.
Then I slept on the problem of the Arrowhead's two-gun bad man. It seemed now pretty certain that the fatuous Boogles had grossly overpraised him. I must question his being the real doughnuts of any sort even the mildest much less the real Peruvian. But what was "'em" that in degrading punishment and to the public shame of the Arrowhead he must wear on the morrow? What, indeed, could "'em" be?
He laughed venomously a short, dry, restrained laugh. "They give me a nickname," said he. "They called me Little Sure Shot. No wonder they did! Ho! I should think they would of called me something like that." He lifted his voice. "Hey! Boogles!" I had been conscious of a stooping figure in the adjacent vegetable garden.
"Next out!" yelled the manager. "Hustle now!" Jimmie Time was next out. He hustled sullenly. Boogles, alone, slept fitfully on his bench until the young thugs of the day watch straggled in. Then he achieved the change of his uniform to civilian garments, with only the accustomed minor maltreatment at the hands of these tormentors.
I lured him to the bench by the corral gate, and there I conferred costly cigarettes on him as man to man. Discreetly then I sounded for the origins of a certain bad man who had a way even though they might crease him of leaving deputy marshals where he found them. Boogles smoked one of the cigarettes before he succumbed; but first: "Let me git my work," said he, and was off to the bunk house.
The law of that city is tender to the human young. Night messenger boys must be adults. It is one of the preliminary shocks to the visitor to ring for the messenger boy of tradition and behold in his uniform a venerable gentleman with perhaps a flowing white beard. I still think Jimmie Time and Boogles were beating the law on a technicality.
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