Explore "His Royal Nibs" by Winnifred Eaton Reeve on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Hard as it is to build up a reputation in a cattle country, which has its own standards of criticism as everywhere else in the world, it is not difficult to lose that reputation. From tongue to tongue rolled the story of Cheerio's weakness and confession at the branding corral, and that story grew like a rolling snowball in the telling, so that presently it would appear that he had confessed not merely to the most arrant cowardice at the front, but gross treachery to his country and his king.
Every man at O Bar O was a war veteran. Few of them, it is true, had seen actual service at the front. Nevertheless, they had acquired the point of view of the man in the army who is quick to suspect and judge one he thinks has "funked. " The most jealous and hard in their judgment were they who were licked in by the long arm of conscription and who had "served" at the Canadian and English camps.