"Much obliged," he said. "I expect to be some busy, but maybe I'll drop in and bed down with yuh; once I hit town, it's hard to tell what I may do."
"I hope you'll feel perfectly free to come at any time and make yourself at home," Mr. Dill urged lonesomely.
"Sure. There's the old burg--I do plumb enjoy seeing the sun making gold on a lot uh town windows, like that over there. It sure looks good, when you've been living by your high lonesome and not seeing any window shine but your own little six-by-eight. Huh?"
"I--I must admit I like better to see the sunset turn my own windows to gold," observed Mr. Dill softly. "I haven't any, now; I sold the old farm when mother died. I was born and raised there. The woods pasture was west of the house, and every evening when I drove up the cows, and the sun was setting, the kitchen windows--"
Alexander P. Dill stopped very abruptly, and Billy, stealing a glance at his face, turned his own quickly away and gazed studiously at a bald hilltop off to the left. So finely tuned was his sympathy that for one fleeting moment he saw a homely, hilly farm in Michigan, with rail fences and a squat old house with wide porch and hard-beaten path from the kitchen door to the well and on to the stables; and down a long slope that was topped with great old trees, Alexander P. Dill shambling contentedly, driving with a crooked stick three mild-mannered old cows. "The blamed chump--what did he go and pull out for?" he asked himself fretfully. Then aloud: "I'm going to have a heart-to-heart talk with the cook at the hotel, and if he don't give us a real old round-up beefsteak, flopped over on the bare stovelids, there'll be things happen I'd hate to name over. He can sure do the business, all right; he used to cook for the Double-Crank. And you," he turned, elaborately cheerful, to Mr. Dill, "you are my guest."
"Thank you," smiled Mr. Dill, recovering himself and never guessing how strange was the last sentence to the lips of Charming Billy Boyle. "I shall be very glad to be the guest of somebody--once more."
"Yuh poor old devil, yuh sure drifted a long ways off your home range," mused Billy. Out loud he only emphasized the arrangement with: "Sure thing!"