pocket of his jersey, the end of it protruding like the come-on roll of a capper at a game.
Peck's exophthalmic eyes enlarged four diameters, apparently, at sight of the money. He turned pale with amazement, his moustache seemed to droop in the close proximity of wealth so carelessly handled.
"Gosh all fiddlers!" he said, leaning toward Mrs. Duke, touching the pile of greasy sheeplands currency with his finger as if to assure himself that it was real. "Ain't you scairt somebody'll come along and hold you up?"
Mrs. Duke looked at him sharply, rebuke in every feature, strangely altered from their good-natured cast to one of stony hardness.
"We don't have that kind of people in this country," she said.
"I wouldn't trust nobody no further than I could see 'em on a cloudy night," Peck declared, with such vehemence that his sincerity could not be questioned.
"You was brought up in a city," Mrs. Duke returned, softened by his honest concern for her money. "In this country we don't go around stickin' folks up with a gun—if we want to rob 'em we build a fence. Nobody'd touch money in this country if they found it layin' at the fork of the road—they'd think somebody'd left it there to pay off one of their hands. We do it, right along. If we can't find one of our sheep-herders when we want to pay him off, we just leave the money in a split stick till he comes along and finds it."
That was a standard sheepman joke for pulling on greenhorns; Rawlins had heard it many a time before. Sometimes a sheepman could get it off as if he believed
