Miss Satterly had changed her pink kimono for a white shirt-waist and
had fluffed her hair into a smooth coil on the top of her head. Weary
thought she looked very nice. She could make excellent lemonade, he
discovered, and she proved herself altogether different from what the
messages she sent him had led him to expect. Weary wondered, until he
became too interested to think about it.
Presently, without quite knowing how it came about, he was telling her
all about the race. Miss Satterly helped him reckon his
winnings--which was not easy to do, since he had been offered all sorts
of odds and had accepted them all with a recklessness that was
appalling. While her dark head was bent above the piece of paper, and
her pencil was setting down figures with precise little jabs, he
watched her. He quite forgot the messages he had received from her
through the medium of the Happy Family, and he quite forgot that women
could hurt a man.
"Mr. Davidson," she announced severely, when the figures had all been
dabbed upon the paper, "You ought to have lost. It would be a lesson
to you. I haven't quite figured all your winnings, these six-to-ones
and ten-to-ones and--and all that, take time to unravel. But you,
yourself, stood to lose just three hundred and sixty-five dollars.
Gee! but you cowboys are reckless."
There was more that she said, but Weary did not mind. He had
discovered that he liked to look at the schoolma'am. After that,
nothing else was of much importance. He began to wish he might prolong
his opportunity for looking.
"Say," he said suddenly, "Come on and let's go to the dance."
The schoolma'am bit at her pencil and looked at him. "It's late--"
"Oh, there's time enough," urged Weary.
"Maybe--but--"
"Do yuh think we aren't well enough acquainted?"
"Well we're not exactly old friends," she laughed.
"We're going to be, so it's all the same," Weary surprised himself by
declaring with much emphasis. "You'd go, wouldn't you, if I was--well,
say your brother?"
Miss Satterly rested her chin in her palms and regarded him
measuringly. "I don't know. I never had one--except three or four
that I--er--adopted, at one time or another. I suppose one could go,
though--with a brother."
Weary made a rapid, mental note for the benefit of the Happy
Family--and particularly Cal Emmett. "Darling Brother" was a myth,
then; he ought to have known it, all along. And if that were a myth,
so probably were all those messages and things that he had hated. She
didn't care anything about him--and suddenly that struck him
unpleasantly, instead of being a relief, as it consistently should have
been.
"I wish you'd adopt me, just for to-night, and go;" he said, and his
eyes backed the wish. "You see," he added artfully, "it's a sin to
waste all that good music--a real, honest-to-God stringed orchestra
from Great Falls, and--"
"Meekers have taken both rigs," objected she, weakly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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