Page:Caroline Lockhart--The Fighting Shepherdess.djvu/76

 bowl that your Uncle Jasper gave us for a wedding present, and Aunt Sarah Page's silver teapot • — Mrs. Sudds admires it tremendously."

Toomey's brow cleared instantly.

"We can do that — I'll raffle it — the punch bowl and get a hundred and fifty out of it easily." He discussed the details enthusiastically, finally blowing out the light and going to sleep as contentedly as though it already had been accomplished.

But in the darkness Mrs. Toomey cried quietly. Selling tickets for a raffle which was for their personal benefit seemed a kind of genteel begging. She wondered that Jap did not feel as she did about it. And what would Mrs. Pantin think? What Mrs. Abram Pantin thought had come to mean a great deal to Mrs. Toomey.

The wind had risen to a gale and she thought nervously of fringed napkins and pillow slips — the wind always gave her the " blues " anyway, and now it reminded her of winter, which was close, with its bitter cold of snow driven across trackless wastes, of gaunt predatory animals, of cattle and horses starving in draws and gulches, and all the other things which winter meant in that barren country. She slept after a time, to find the next morning that the wind still howled and the fringe on her laundry was all she had pictured.

Toomey set forth gaily immediately after breakfast with the punch bowl wrapped in a newspaper, and Mrs. Toomey nerved herself to negotiate for the sale of the teapot to Mrs. Sudds, in the event of his being unsuccessful.

She watched for his return eagerly, but it was two o'clock before she saw him coming, leaning against the wind and clasping the punch bowl to his bosom. Her