"Rattlesnake," observed Cimarron Bill, with a pompous solemnity that was not wanting in effect upon his auditor, "you've come to a bad, boggy, quicksand crossin'. My advice is not to jump your pony off the bank, but ride in slow."
"As how?" asked Rattlesnake Sanders, somewhat mystified.
"You think I'm honest, don't you?" demanded Cimarron.
"Shore, I think you're honest," returned Rattlesnake Sanders. Then, cautiously: "But still I allers sort o' allowed you had you're honesty onder control."
"Well, this is the straight goods at any rate," said Cimarron. "Thar's two kinds of folks you must never surrender to: ladies an' Injuns. Surrender to either is the shore preloode to torture. For you, now, to go surgin' rapturously into Dodge, like a drunkard to a barbecue, would be the crownin' disaster of your c'reer."
"Whatever then should be my little game?"
"It's this a-way: I said you can't afford to surrender to Injuns an' ladies. But you can make treaties with 'em. That gives you a chance to preeserve yourse'f for yourse'f. What you ought to do is plant yourse'f as solid as a gob of mud, an' send back word that you're thinkin' it over."
"But s'pose Calamity goes in the air, an' says it's all off?"
"That's a resk no brave man should refoose to take. You want to remember that she slammed a door in your face; that she set Bat to run you out o' camp." These reminders clearly stiffened Rattlesnake Sanders. "For you to surrender, onconditional, would incite her to new crooelties that would lay over them former inhoomanities like a king-full lays over a pa'r of treys. Once," went on Cimarron, who began to be intoxicated with his own eloquence, "once a party back in St. Looey shows me a picture of a man chained to a rock, an' a turkey buzzard t'arin' into him, beak an' claw. He said it was a sport named Prometheus bein' fed upon by vultures. In my pore opinion that party was barkin' at a knot. The picture wasn't meant for Prometheus an' the vultures. The painter who daubs it had nothin' on his mind but jest to show, pictor'ally, exactly what marriage is like. It was nothin' more nor less than that gifted genius' notion of a married man done in colours."
This outburst so moulded the hopes and fears, especially the fears, of Rattlesnake that he gave himself completely to the guidance of Cimarron Bill.