Deely supplemented this chaste remark about the
broncho with the observation that, "Same as the broncho, you buckle him
tightest when you know the divil is stirring in his underbrush." And he
added further, "'Tis a woman that's put the mumplaster on his tongue,
Sibley, and I bet you a hundred it's another man's wife."
Like many a speculator, Malachi Deely would have made no profit out of
his bet in the end, for Shiel Crozier had had no trouble with the law,
or with another man's wife, nor yet with any single maid--not yet; though
there was now Kitty Tynan in his path. Yet he had had trouble. There
was hint of it in his occasional profound abstraction; but more than all
else in the fact that here he was, a gentleman, having lived his life for
over four years past as a sort of horse-expert, overseer, and stud-
manager for Terry Brennan, the absentee millionaire. In the opinion of
the West, "big-bugs" did not come down to this kind of occupation unless
they had been roughly handled by fate or fortune.
"Talk? Watch me now, he talks like a testimonial in a frame," said
Malachi Deely on the day this tale opens, to John Sibley, the gambling
young farmer who, strange to say, did well out of both gambling and
farming.
"Words to him are like nuts to a monkey. He's an artist, that man is.
Been in the circles where the band plays good and soft, where the music
smells--fairly smells like parfumery," responded Sibley.
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