"I realize that this is not Michigan, and that the temptations are--But we will not discuss it.

I shall be very grateful for your friendship, and--" "Grateful!" snorted Billy, spilling tobacco on the strip of faded ingrain carpet before the bed.

"Grateful--hell!" Mr.Dill looked at him a moment and there was a certain keen man-measuring behind the wistfulness.

But he said no more about the friendship of Charming Billy Boyle, which was as well.
That is why the two of them later sat apart on the sunny side of the hotel "office"-- which was also a saloon--and talked of many things, but chiefly of the cattle industry as Montana knows it and of the hopes and the aims of Alexander P.Dill.Perhaps, also, that is why Billy breathed clean of whisky and had the bulk of his winter wages still unspent in his pocket.
"Looks to me," he was saying between puffs, "like you'd uh stayed back where yuh knew the lay uh the land, instead uh drifting out here where it's all plumb strange to yuh." "Well, several incidents influenced my actions," Mr.Dill explained quietly.

"I had always lived within twenty miles of my birthplace.
I owned a general store in a little place near the old farm, and did well.