“Say, Hilda, guess what I found to-day? I didn’t reckernize it at
first until he said it was his. Viper rooted it up right under his
window outside the bunkhouse. Well, I found that picture of his girl
that he keeps in that locket. It must’ve slipped out, and Viper nearly
chewed it up. So I yipped to him to come on out and I give it up to
him and I says: ‘Whose her nibs anyway,’ and he says: ‘Someone I used
to know,’ and I says: ‘Don’t you know her still?’ and he says: ‘Oh,
yes, oh, yes,’ and he was lookin’ just as if he wasn’t hearin’ a word
I was saying and he says as if he was talking to himself; ‘She was
to have been my wife, you know.’ Just like that. Then he got up and
he looked kind of queer, and he went on inside and come on out again
with that locket in his hand and he sits down beside me on the steps
and smokes without saying a word. So then I said, just to kid him:
‘Say, I’ll give you two of my buffalow skulls for that bit of dinky
tin,’ meaning the locket, and he dumps his pipe and gives me the laugh
and he says: ‘Nothing doing, old man. The sweetest girl in the world
is enshined’--that’s what he said--‘right inside that “dinky bit of
tin”!’”