Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/191

 in his peculiar habit in a country where men tucked the bottoms of their trousers out of sight within their boots as if shame attended the display.

There once was a politician in Missouri who wore his boots in this fashion, hiding their tops away like a scandal. He walked through office after office in that state on no other virtue than his boots. Wearing boots when and where other men wore shoes made him famous in his day. He died at last in Washington, whither his boots had carried him, his nose in the public crib as the seventeenth assistant secretary of something, his boots on his feet. Justice had unbounded admiration for that man, whom he resembled in a way and was aware of it. If boots had made one man famous, why shouldn't they do as much for two?

Jim's feet were small, his boots tight over the insteps and wrinkled elegantly around the ankles; his trousers were long, rolled up in several turns as if he kept a quantity of cloth by him for an emergency. Over all he wore a smoky-dun hat that once had been white, with a broad brim and high, round crown.

This hat was not the happiest touch that Jim could have given his ensemble. Under it his bulging jowls and drowned-looking, slovenly mustache were not at their best, nature having assembled his features for a headpiece of a different sort. A cap with ear-muffs, Dr. Hall thought, looking at his visitor's portly figure in the door.

"No," Jim declined, when Dr. Hall offered him the chair, "I'll set over here in the door. I don't see how you can set there and take your ease in that chair, Doc. I'll be busted if I could. I'd be thinkin' all the time somebody was goin' to make a grab for one of my teeth. Well,