Miss Stevens gave him a chilly smile, the kind that is worse than none at all and turned her back, thinly pretending that she heard her brother calling her, which she did not. Her brother was loudly explaining what would have happened if he had been on that train and had got a whack at the robbers, and his sister was far from his mind.
Graves slapped the shoulder of the fellow they had called Park. “You young devil, next time I leave the place for a week--yes, or overnight--I'll lock yuh up in the blacksmith shop. Have yuh got to be Mona's special escort, these days?”
“Different here--yuh ain't much account, as it is. Bud, this here's my wagon-boss, Park Holloway; one of 'em, that is. I'm going to turn yuh over to him and let him wise yuh up. Say, you young bucks ought to get along together pretty smooth. Your dads run buffalo together before either of yuh was born. Well, let's be moving--we ain't home yet. Got a war-bag, Bud?”
Late that night Thurston lay upon a home-made bed and listened to the frogs croaking monotonously in the hollow behind the house, and to the lone coyote which harped upon the subject of his wrongs away on a distant hillside, and to the subdued snoring of Hank Graves in the room beyond. He was trying to adjust himself to this new condition of things, and the new condition refused utterly to be measured by his accepted standard.
According to that standard, he should feel repulsed and annoyed by the familiarity of strangers who persisted in calling him “Bud” without taking the trouble to find out whether or not he liked it. And what puzzled Thurston and put him all at sea was the consciousness that he did like it, and that it struck familiarly upon his ears as something to which he had been accustomed in the past.
Also, according to his well-ordered past, he should hate this raw life and rawer country where could occur such brutal things as he had that day witnessed. He should dislike a man like Park Holloway who, having wounded a man unto death, had calmly dismissed the subject with the regret that his aim had not been better, so that he could have saved the county the expense of trying and hanging the fellow. Thurston was amazed to find that, down in the inner man of him, he admired Park Holloway exceedingly, and privately resolved to perfect himself in the use of fire-arms, he who had been wont to deplore the thinly veneered savagery of men who liked such things.