Frontier and pioneer life -- Fiction; Oklahoma -- History -- Land Rush, 1893 -- Fiction; Western stories
“I’m sorry Bart quit,” she said. “You see he won’t stick at anything.”
“Don’t know as I blame him,” said Carver. “The last few days I’ve
developed a downright aversion to the sight of fence wire myself. Glad
to see me?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll be out of here and established in a room of
my own so that you can have your house by to-morrow, Don. I’ve been
waiting for the present occupants to vacate.”
“You stay right on here,” he insisted. “I won’t be needing it.”
“Thanks, Don, but I can’t do that,” she said. “I have to stop floating
and find some nook of my own. I can’t follow Bart around any longer.
For three years now we’ve drifted from one spot to the next; sometimes
in line camps; more frequently in some rooming house in any town where
we happened to be, always knowing that wherever it was it wouldn’t be
home for long. I didn’t mind at first, for I was trying to keep Bart
away from Milt and Noll; but they always turn up again and he follows
them off. I’d love even a sod house if only I could call it my own
and know I wouldn’t have to move out on an hour’s notice. I’m sick of
gypsying. I want to feel settled--feel that I’m attached!”
He reached over and rested a hand on her shoulder.
“I know, Honey,” he said. “So do I. That’s exactly my own frame of
mind. The best way all round is for you and me to get attached and
settle. Won’t you?”
She felt that he had failed to grasp the fact of what a sense of
permanency would mean to her after the nomadic existence she had
followed for the past few years.
“Listen, Molly,” he said, divining something of her thoughts. “It’s not
the way a man says a thing but the way he means it that really counts.
And I was meaning that a lot.”
“But you don’t even know to-day what you’re going to do to-morrow,” she
said. “It would be only exchanging one state of gypsying for another.
Don’t you see that?”
He did, at least, see that the moment was not right and he settled back
into his chair and twisted a cigarette.
“You always lean to the dark side of things,” he accused. “Most
complaints I’ve heard about family strife was occasioned because
menfolks generally were so occupied with business that they didn’t
spend much time at home. Now with me not having any special business it
would leave me free to put in most of my time around the house. There’s
that advantage.”
“Yes,” she laughed. “There’s that. Sometimes, Don, I almost wish you
really were a settled sort of a soul; but that time will never be.”
Carver crooned softly:
“Oh, I’m a rolling rambler,”
Said the speeding tumbleweed.
“The prairies are my race track,
The wild wind is my steed.
“I never cease my roaming;
I’m always hard to catch,
But the pumpkin stays forever
In the same old garden patch.
“But I’d rather be a wild, wild weed
Than a sluggish yellow squash:”
“And I’d so much rather be a pumpkin than the wildest of all wild
weeds,” she said. “There’s only that little difference between the two
of us.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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