Then he joined in his
visitor's laughter. "How can a man get along without the co-
operation of his own household?" he inquired, naively. "Maybe it
was next year I was thinking about." Thereafter he confined
himself to statements which required no corroboration.
Dave had long since learned that to hold Blaze Jones to a strict
accountability with fact was to rob his society of its greatest
charm. A slavish accuracy in figures, an arid lack of imagination,
reduces conversation to the insipidness of flat wine, and Blaze's
talk was never dull. He was a keen, shrewd, practical man, but
somewhere in his being there was concealed a tremendous, lop-sided
sense of humor which took the form of a bewildering imagery. An
attentive audience was enough for him, and, once his fancy was in
full swing, there was no limit to his outrageous exaggerations. A
light of credulity in a hearer's eye filled him with prodigious
mirth, and it is doubtful if his listeners ever derived a fraction
of the amusement from his fabrications that he himself enjoyed.
Paloma's spirit of contradiction was the only fly in his ointment;
now that his daughter was old enough to "keep books" on him, much
of the story-teller's joy was denied him.
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