Page:Caroline Lockhart--The Fighting Shepherdess.djvu/115

 dismounted and went inside the latter, where soiled breakfast dishes sat on the unplaned boards which served as a table. In the way of food there was only a can of molasses and a half dozen biscuits frozen solid. "Real cozy and homelike," Lingle commented, as he tried to pour himself some cold coffee and found it frozen. "I'll look around a bit and then go up and tell her."

"I'd rather it ud be you than me," Bowers observed grimly. "Can't abide hearin' a female take on and beller. I don't like the sect, noway. You kin bet I don't aim to stay no longer than she kin git another herder, neither."

But Lingle was already out of hearing of the querulous voice of the misogynist, and peering into the tepee which was as Mormon Joe had left it he noted that it contained an unmade bed, and extra pair of shoes, and a few articles of wearing apparel that was all.

The door of the sheep wagon was unlocked, yet he hesitated a moment before opening it. Its examination was in line with his duty, however, so he opened it and looked about with a certain amount of curiosity. The bare, cold stillness of it went to his marrow.

There was something pathetic to him in the pitiful attempts at home making shown in the few crude decorations. A feminine instinct for domesticity evidenced itself in the imitation of the scalloped border of a lace curtain made in soap on the glass of the small window in the back of the wagon, in a pin cushion of coarse muslin worked in blue worsted yarn, in the bouquet of dried goldenrod in a bottle, in the highly colored picture of an ammunition company's advertisement pinned to the canvas wall. A snag of a comb and a brush were thrust in a wooden strip near the small cheap mirror.

Above the bunk two loops of wire were suspended from