Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/202

 "Sure," Jim agreed heartily. "I admired your grit when you butted into that feller and h'isted like a ingin hittin' a bull. But I'll be derned if I know yit whuther you're simple, or a plain derned fool."

"You'd just as well stop trying to figure out, Jim. Nobody ever could do it."

"Well, you got 'em, you got 'em when you opened that door and come out with nothin' but a sponge full of something to stand off forty or fifty men. I tell you, Doc, that got 'em! Some of them fellers's sayin' this morning it wasn't nothing but a bluff, but if it was a bluff it was a dang good one."

"Thanks," said Hall, not insensible to the praise. It came in such relief of his late embarrassment that he felt himself soaring a little. He tiptoed and strutted, as if about to take off for a flight over Damascus and view it from the heights of a perfectly complacent egotism.

"But say, Doc, honest now: what was that stuff you had on that sponge?"

"That? That was psychology." Gravely, all his confusion gone, meeting Jim eye to eye.

"Si—whichery?"

"Psychology."

"That must be something new, I never heard of it in my time. Strong, heh?"

"One of the most dangerous things ever discovered."

"What does it do to a feller, Doc?"

"A little of it in either the ear or the eye has been known to make a man as crazy as a bat."

"Well, I'll be jiggered!" said Jim.

Jim was so eager to get back to the hotel and report success on his previously declared intention of getting out