"He doesn"t behave like a horse that has made the long trip he has made," Bud"s mother observed admiringly. "You must be a wonderful little horsewoman, my dear, as well as a wonderful little woman in every other way. Buddy should never have sent you on such a trip--just to bring home money, like a bank messenger! But I"m glad that he did! And I do wish you would consent to stay--such an afternoon with music I haven"t had since Buddy left us. You could stay with me and train for the concert work you intend doing. I"m only an old ranch woman in a slat sunbonnet--but I taught my Buddy--and have you heard him?"
"An old woman in a slat sunbonnet--oh, how can you? Why, you"re the most wonderful woman in the whole world." Marian"s voice was almost tearful in its protest. "Yes--I have heard--your Buddy."
""T is the strangest way to go about selling a horse that I ever saw,"
Bob Birnie put in dryly, smoothing his beard while he looked at them.
"We"d be glad to have you stay, la.s.s. But you"ve asked me to place a price on the horse, and I should like to ask ye a question or two. How fast did ye say he could run?"
Marian laid an arm around the shoulders of the old lady in a slat sunbonnet and patted her arm while she answered.
"Well, he beat everything in the country, so they refused to race against him, until Bud came with his horses," she replied. "It took Sunfish to outrun him. He "s terribly fast, Mr. Birnie. I--really, I think he could beat the world"s record--if Bud rode him!"
Just here you should picture Ed and Jerry with their hands over their mouths, and Bud wanting to hide his face with his hat.
Bob Birnie"s beard behaved oddly for a minute, while he leaned and stroked Boise"s flat forelegs, that told of speed. "Wee-ll," he hesitated, soft-heartedness battling with the horse-buyer"s keenness, "since Bud is na ere to ride him, he"ll make a good horse for the roundup. I"ll give ye "--more battling--"a hundred and fifty dollars for him, if ye care to sell--"
"Here, wait a minute before you sell to that old skinflint!" Bud shouted exuberantly, dismounting with a rush. The rush, I may say, carried him to the little old lady in the slat sunbonnet, and to that other little lady who was staring at him with wide, bright yes. Bud"s arms went around his mother. Perhaps by accident he gathered in Marian also--they were standing very close, and his arms were very long--and he was slow to discover his mistake.
"I"ll give you two hundred for Boise, and I"ll throw in one brother, and one long-legged, good-for-nothing cowpuncher--"
"Meaning yourself, Buddy?" came teasingly from he slat sunbonnet, whose occupant had not been told just everything. "I"ll be surprised if she"ll have you, with that dirty face and no shave for a week and more. But if she does, you"re luckier than you deserve, for riding up on us like this! We"ve heard all about you, Buddy--though you were wise to send this la.s.sie to gild your faults and make a hero of you!"
Now, you want to know how Marian managed to live through that. I will say that she discovered how tenaciously a young man"s arms may cling when he thinks he is embracing merely his mother; but she freed herself and ran to Eddie, fairly pulled him off his horse, and talked very fast and incoherently to him and Jerry, asking question after question without waiting for a reply to any of them. All this, I suppose, in the hope that they would not hear, or, hearing, would not understand what that terrible, wonderful little woman was saying so innocently.
But you cannot faze youth. Eddie had important news for Sis, and he felt that now was the time to tell it before Marian blushed any redder, so he pulled her face up to his, put his lips so close to her ear that his breath tickled, and whispered--without any preface whatever that she could marry Bud any time now, because she was a widow.
"Here! Somebody--Bud--quick! Sis has fainted! Doggone it, I only told her Lew"s dead and she can marry you--shucks! I thought she"d be glad!"
Down on the Staked Plains, on an evening much like the evening when Bud came home with his "stake" and his hopes and two black sheep who were becoming white as most of us, a camp-fire began to crackle and wave smoke ribbons this way and that before it burned steadily under the supper pots of a certain hungry, happy group which you know.
"It"s somewhere about here that I got lost from camp when I was a kid,"
Bud observed, tilting back his hat and lifting a knee to snap a dry stick over it. "Mother"d know, I bet. I kinda wish we"d brought her and dad along with us. That"s about eighteen years ago they trailed a herd north--and here we are, taking our trail--herd north on the same trail!
I kinda wish now I"d picked up a bunch of yearling heifers along with our two-year-olds. We could have brought another hundred head just as well as not. They sure drive nice. Mother would have enjoyed this trip."
"You think so, do you?" Marian gave him a superior little smile along with the coffee-boiler. "If you"d heard her talk about that trip north when there weren"t any men around listening, you"d change your mind.
Bud Birnie, you are the SIMPLEST creature! You think, because a woman doesn"t make a fuss over things, she doesn"t mind. Your mother told me that it was a perfect nightmare. She taught you music just in the hope that you"d go back to civilization and live there where there are some modern improvements, and she could visit you! And here you are--all rapped up in a bunch of young stock, dirty as pig and your whiskers--ow!
Bud! Stop that immediatly, or I"ll go put my face in a cactus just for relief!"
"Maybe you"re dissatisfied yourself with my bunch of cattle. Maybe you didn"t go in raptures over our aim and make more plans in a day than four men could carry out in a year. Maybe you wish your husband was a man that was content to pound piano keys all his life and let his hair grow long instead of his whiskers. If you hate this, why didn"t you say so?"
"I was speaking," said Marian as dignifiedly as was possible, "of your mother. She was raised in civilization, and she has simply made the best of pioneering all her married life. I was born and raised in cow-country and I love it. As I said before, you are the SIMPLEST creature! Would you really bring a father and mother a honeymoon trail--especially when the bride didn"t want them, and they would much rather stay home?"
"Hey!" cried Eddie disgustedly, coming up from a shallow creek with a bucket of water and a few dry sticks. "The coffee"s upset and putting the fire out. Gee whiz! Can"t you folks quit love-makin" and tend to business long enough to cook a meal?"