Page:Caroline Lockhart--The Fighting Shepherdess.djvu/141



stinacy which was pathetic, she endeavored to keep him on the pedestal where she had placed him. She listened with a fixed smile of interest to the extraordinary schemes he outlined to her, sometimes hypnotizing herself into believing in them, until he returned with the exaggerated swagger which proclaimed another failure. Then she would join him in his denunciation of those who could not see the value of his plan and refused to aid him.

But the conviction that Jap had not the qualities to win material success did not hurt as did the knowledge that he was not too brave to lie, too proud to borrow from those he considered his social inferiors and with no notion of repaying the obligation, nor too honest to obtain money by any subterfuge that occurred to him.

When she had attempted to borrow money from Abram Pantin, the light esteem in which that astute person held her husband had been as painful as her disappointment, for it was her first definite knowledge of others' estimate of him. Since then, with her eyes opened, she had come to see that Jap was regarded in Prouty as something between a joke and a pest.

Mrs. Toomey was thinking of Mormon Joe's murder one morning while she dusted, and of Kate — conjecturing as to what would become of the girl when the bank foreclosed and she lost everything. She sighed as, with the comer of her apron, she removed a smudge from her nose before the mirror. Wasn't there anything in the world any more but trouble for people who had no money?

She glanced casually out of the window and stiffened in something very like horror.

Kate was in front, tying her horse to a transplanted cottonwood sapling. What if Prissy Pantin should see her! She was visibly agitated, when she opened the door