Humorous stories; Washington (State) -- Fiction; Western stories
"Pretty soon she gets up and goes over to her horse, picking her way
daintily in the silly little tan pumps, and seems to be offering the
beast something. The stricken man follows her the second he can without
being too raw about it, and there is the adorably feminine thing with a
big dill pickle, two deviled eggs, and a half of one of these Camelbert
cheeses for her horse. Mr. D. has a good masterly laugh at her idea of
horse fodder and calls her 'But, my dear child!' and she looks prettily
offended and offers this chuck to the horse and he gulps it all down and
noses round for more of the same. It was an old horse named Croppy that
she'd known from childhood and would eat anything on earth. She rode him
up here once and he nabbed a bar of laundry soap off the back porch and
chewed the whole thing down with tears of ecstasy in his eyes and
frothing at the mouth like a mad dog. Well, so Hetty gives mister man a
look of dainty superiority as she flicks crumbs from her white fingers
with my real lace handkerchief, and he stops his hearty laughter and
just stares, and she says what nonsense to think the poor horses don't
like food as well as any one. Them little moments have their effect on a
man in a certain condition. He knew there probably wasn't another horse
in the world would touch that truck, but he couldn't help feeling a
strange new respect for her in addition to that glorious masculine
protection she'd had him wallowing in all day.
"The ride home, at least on the part of the Non Plush Ultra cut-ups, was
like they had laid a loved one to final rest out there on the lone
mountainside. The handsome stranger and Hetty brought up the rear,
conversing eagerly about themselves and other serious topics. I believe
he give her to understand that he'd been pretty wild at one time in his
life and wasn't any too darned well over it yet, but that some good
womanly woman who would study his ways could still take him and make a
man of him; and her answering that she knew he must have suffered beyond
human endurance in that horrible conflict with his lower nature. He said
he had.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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