Idaho -- Fiction; Ranch life -- Fiction; Western stories
“All right, Mum. We won't look toward the garden to-day,” Wally promised
largely, and held out his cup to her to be refilled. “You can keep my
gun, if you want to make dead sure.”
“No, I can trust my boys, I hope,” and she glowed with real pride in
them when she said it.
Good Indian lingered on the porch for half an hour or so, waiting for
Evadna to appear. She may have seen him through the window--at any rate
she slipped out very quietly, and had her breakfast half eaten before
he suspected that she was up; and when he went into the kitchen, she was
talking animatedly with Marie about Mexican drawn-work, and was drawing
intricate little diagrams of certain patterns with her fork upon the
tablecloth.
She looked up, and gave him a careless greeting, and went back to
discussing certain “wheels” in the corner of an imaginary lunch-cloth
and just how one went about making them. He made a tentative remark or
two, trying to win her attention to himself, but she pushed her cup and
saucer aside to make room for further fork drawings, and glanced at him
with her most exaggerated Christmas-angel look.
“Don't interrupt, please,” she said mincingly. “This is IMPORTANT. And,”
she troubled to explain, “I'm really in a hurry, because I'm going to
help Aunt Phoebe make strawberry jam.”
If she thought that would fix his determination to remain and have her
to himself for a few minutes, she was mistaken in her man. Good Indian
turned on his heel, and went out with his chin in the air, and found
that Gene and Clark had gone off to the meadow, with Donny an unwelcome
attendant, and that Wally and Jack were keeping the dust moving between
the gate and the stable, trying to tempt a shot from the bluff. They
were much inclined to be skeptical regarding the bullet which Good
Indian carried in his breast-pocket.
“WE can't raise anybody,” Wally told him disgustedly, “and I've made
three round trips myself. I'm going to quit fooling around, and go to
work.”
Whether he did or not, Good Indian did not wait to prove. He did not
say anything, either, about his own plans. He was hurt most unreasonably
because of Evadna's behavior, and he felt as if he were groping about
blindfolded so far as the Hart trouble was concerned. There must be
something to do, but he could not see what it was. It reminded him oddly
of when he sat down with his algebra open before him, and scowled at
a problem where the x y z's seemed to be sprinkled through it with a
diabolical frequency, and there was no visible means of discovering what
the unknown quantities could possibly be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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