A day or two more won't hurt Rufe
any, though.'
"'Shucks, now,' says I, in the mountain idiom, 'don't tell me there's
a man in Mount Nebo as bad as that.'
"'Worse,' says the storekeeper. 'He steals hogs.'
"I think I will look up this Mr. Tatum; so a day or two after the
constable turned him out I got acquainted with him and invited him out
on the edge of town to sit on a log and talk business.
"What I wanted was a partner with a natural rural make-up to play a
part in some little one-act outrages that I was going to book with the
Pitfall & Gin circuit in some of the Western towns; and this R. Tatum
was born for the role as sure as nature cast Fairbanks for the stuff
that kept _Eliza_ from sinking into the river.
"He was about the size of a first baseman; and he had ambiguous blue
eyes like the china dog on the mantelpiece that Aunt Harriet used to
play with when she was a child. His hair waved a little bit like the
statue of the dinkus-thrower at the Vacation in Rome, but the color
of it reminded you of the 'Sunset in the Grand Canon, by an American
Artist,' that they hang over the stove-pipe holes in the salongs.
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