Only his eyes were wistfully melancholy.
"My name is Alexander P.Dill," he informed Billy quite unnecessarily.
"I was going to the Murton place.

They told me it was only ten miles from town and it seems as though I must have taken the wrong road, somehow.

Could you tell me about where it would be from here ?" Charming Billy's cupped hands hid his mouth, but his eyes laughed.
"Roads ain't so plenty around here that you've any call to take one that don't belong to yuh," he reproved, when his cigarette was going well.

"If Hardup's the place yuh started from, and if they headed yah right when they turned yuh loose, you've covered about eighteen miles and bent 'em into a beautiful quarter-circle--and how yuh ever went and done it undeliberate gets _me_.

You are now seven miles from Hardup and sixteen miles, more or less, from Murton's." He stopped to watch the effect of his information.
Alexander P.Dill was a long man--an exceedingly long man, as Billy had already observed--and now he drooped so that he reminded Billy of shutting up a telescope.