Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/32

 in the country west of Dodge. They were the kind that built high schools for the taxpayers to pay for, and agitated around and closed up the saloons. They'd have to be frostbitten in the bud, and that minute Jim had no frost on his breath. Fire, rather, which gathered in his bristled old badger eyes.

"Do you want supper?" he asked, implying that it would be an unwelcome desire, the desire of one aspiring to a place above him and a privilege belonging to his betters.

"Why not?" Hall returned, in that self-sure, serenely adjusted way of his. He still had his hands in his trousers pockets, the long coat divided back from his lean body, pencils showing in his vest pocket, the braid of his watch, with a gold swivel, looped across his breast.

"A lot of fellers stay at hotels to make a front and take their meals out in cheap joints," Jim replied. His words were acrimonious as alum, insulting without diguise. The guest turned to the window again, feet wide apart to adjust his stature to a pane from which the winter's grime had been rubbed.

"Not a bad scheme," he said, giving it a genial endorsement, as if to say it had not come into his mind to do it, but that he would not be above trying it on if he liked, with no consideration for the profit or opinions of any hotel keeper whatever.

"I'll let any man that tries it on me know his room's better than his company," Jim declared. "I've done it before to-day."

"I think you're wrong there, entirely wrong."

Hall stood lifting himself to his toes, settling back to his heels; lifting, settling. It was a kind of preoccupied