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Updated: May 5, 2025
I believed I should like it. I always liked animals." "Uh-huh so do I." It was not just what Charming Billy most wanted to say, but that much was perfectly safe, and noncommittal to say. Mr. Dill was silent a minute, looking speculatively across to the Hardup Saloon which was practically empty and therefore quite peaceful.
So I'll just string you up after awhile, when I get around to it and leave a note saying who you are, and that you're the head push in this rustling business, and that you helped spend the money that Hardup bank lost awhile back; and that you're one of the gazabos " "You can't prove it! You " "I don't have to prove it. The authorities will do all that when they get the tip I'll give them.
At any rate, the combination at the ranch did not tempt him to neglect his business, and he galloped down the trail without so much as looking back to see if Flora would wave possibly because he was afraid he might catch the flutter of a handkerchief in fingers other than hers. It was when the round-up was on its way in that Billy, stopping for an hour in Hardup, met Dill in the post office.
Much as at the beginning, he was leaning heavily upon the bar in the Hardup Saloon, and his hat was pushed back on his head; but he was not hilarious to the point of singing about "the young thing," and he was not, to any appreciable extent, enjoying himself. He was merely adding what he considered the proper finishing touch to his calamities.
"I wouldn't mind a game myself," Dill observed, in his hesitating way. In the end, however, they gave up the idea and started for home; because two men were already playing at the only table in Hardup, and they were in no mind to wait indefinitely. Outside the town, Dill turned gravely to the other, "Did you say you were intending to camp down by the creek, William?" he asked slowly. "Why, yes.
After a couple of weeks he stopped long enough to make a hurried trip to Hardup, a little town forty miles farther up in the hills. In the little bank there he exchanged his gold harvest for coin of the realm, and he was well satisfied with the result. It was not a fortune, nor was he likely to find one in the hills.
That they had been practically in the saddle since dawn was a trifle not to be considered; they would dance until another dawn to make up for it. Hardup, decked meagrely in the colors that spell patriotism, was unwontedly alive and full of Fourth of July noises.
Lord Scamperdale was the eighth earl; and, according to the usual alternating course of great English families one generation living and the next starving it was his lordship's turn to live; but the seventh earl having been rather unreasonable in the length of his lease, the present earl, who during the lifetime of his father was Lord Hardup, had contracted such parsimonious habits, that when he came into possession he could not shake them off; and but for the fortunate friendship of Abraham Brown, the village blacksmith, who had given his young idea a sporting turn, entering him with ferrets and rabbits, and so training him on with terriers and rat-catching, badger-baiting and otter-hunting, up to the noble sport of fox-hunting itself, in all probability his lordship would have been a regular miser.
He rode on to Hardup, spent the night there swallowing more whisky than he had drunk before in six months, and after that playing poker with a recklessness that found a bitter satisfaction in losing and thus proving how vilely the world was using him, and went home rather unsteadily at sunrise and slept heavily in the bunk-house all that day.
Best of all, Lady Scamperdale has got his lordship to erect a handsome marble monument to poor Jack, instead of the cheap country stone he intended. The inscription states that it was erected by Samuel, Eighth Earl of Scamperdale, and Viscount Hardup, in the Peerage of Ireland, to the Memory of John Spraggon, Esquire, the best of Sportsmen, and the firmest of Friends.
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