“If you’d slant yore eyes out through the door you’d see what Luke Tweezy’s gotta do with it.”

Racey Dawson looked up and immediately sat down on the hay and spoke in a low tone.

Swing nodded with delight.  “You’ll cuss worse’n that when I go over and make Luke introduce me,” he said.  “He’s been out there on the porch with ’em the last five minutes, and you was so busy argufyin’ with me you never looked up to see him.  And you talk of going over and doing the polite.  Yah, you make me laugh.  This is shore one on you, Racey.  Don’t you wish now you hadn’t made out to be so drunk?  Lookit, Luke.  He’s a-offerin’ ’em something in a paper poke.  They’re a-eatin’ it.  He musta bought some candy.  I’ll bet they’s all of a dime’s worth in that bag.  The spendthrift.  How he must like them girls.  It’s yore girl he’s shining up to special, Racey.  Ain’t he the lady-killer?  Look out, Racey.  You won’t have a chance alongside of Luke Tweezy.”

“Swing,” said Racey, in a voice ominously calm and level, “if you don’t shut yore trap I’ll shore wrastle you down and tromp on yore stummick.”

So saying he reached for Swing Tunstall.  But the latter, watchful person that he was, eluded the clutching hands and hurried through the doorway.

Racey, seething with rage, could only sit and hug his knees while Swing went up on the porch and was introduced to the two girls.  It was some balm to his tortured soul to see how ill Luke Tweezy took Swing’s advent.  Did Luke really like Molly Dale?  The old goat!  Why, the man was old enough to be her father.

And did she like him?  Lordy man alive, how could she?  But Luke Tweezy had money.  Girls liked money, Racey knew that.  He had known a girl to marry a more undesirable human being than Luke Tweezy simply because the man was rich.  Personally, he, Racey Dawson, were he a girl, would prefer the well-known honest heart to all the wealth in the territory.  But girls were queer, and sometimes did queer things.  Molly, was she queer?  He didn’t know.  She looked sensible, yet why was she so infernally polite to Luke Tweezy?  She didn’t have to smile at him when he spoke to her.  It wasn’t necessary.  Racey’s spirit groaned within him.  Finally, the spectacle of the chattering group on the back porch of the Blue Pigeon proved more than Racey could stand.  He retreated into a dark corner of the barn and lay down on the hay.  But he did not go to sleep.  Far from it.  Later he removed his boots, stuffed them full of hay, and hunkered down behind a dismounted wagon-seat over which a wagon-cover had been flung.  With a short length of rope and several handfuls of hay he propped the boots in such a position that they stuck out beyond the wagon-box ten or twelve inches and gave every evidence of human occupation.

Boosting up with a bushel basket the stiff canvas at the end opposite the boots he made the wagon-cover stretch long enough and high enough to conceal the important fact that there were no legs or body attached to the boots.