Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/57

 the range, like most cowmen you meet. He made his start as a telegraph operator for the railroad, they tell me. He had a gamblin' spirit in him that made him take long chances and risks where an old-time range man wouldn't 'a' risked a dollar, and he won out, every throw. Don't understand me to say Charley's a gambler in any other way. He ain't. He never touches a card. All the plays he makes are in cattle. He plays them cattle of his agin them Kansas City bankers like a man plays chess. I don't know, but I kind of look for Charley to hit the sky one of these days."

"He must be a remarkable sort of man," Hall mused, thinking he had not been so very far off in his estimate of Burnett, after all. He had taken him for a gambler, but not a gambler in such ponderous assets as herds of cattle.

"Charley's a funny feller in some ways," Jim said. He laughed, or rather made certain short and rapid expulsions of breath through his hair-nested nose, smothered, but unmistakable, sound of mirth.

"He seems to have at least one queer habit, if it is a habit," Hall admitted. "I mean of carrying a handful of broken glass around in his pocket, and pouring it from hand to hand while he talks."

"Glass!" Jim discounted the word, almost in derision. "Glass! Them's diamonds."

"No-o-o! Diamonds? Why, what on earth—"

"Diamonds, genu-wine, eighteen carat diamonds," Jim declared, conclusively. "Charley's been carryin' a tablespoonful of diamond rocks around in his pocket for two or three years—ever since he hit it big with cattle. He's got a chamois-skin pocket in every pair of his pants.