Page:Heart of the West (1907).djvu/75

 Why yes, Uncle Emsley,’ I says out loud, ‘I’d be awful edified to meet Miss Learight.”

“So Uncle Emsley took me out in the yard and gave us each other’s entitlements.

“‘I never was shy about women. I never could understand why some men who can break a mustang before breakfast and shave in the dark, get all left-handed and full of perspiration and excuses when they see a bolt of calico draped around what belongs in it. Inside of eight minutes me and Miss Willella was aggravating the croquet balls around as amiable as second cousins. She gave me a dig about the quantity of canned fruit I had eaten, and I got back at her, flat-footed, about how a certain lady named Eve started the fruit trouble in the first free-grass pasture—‘Over in Palestine, wasn’ it?’ says I, as easy and pat as roping a one-year-old.

“That was how I acquired cordiality for the proximities of Miss Willella Learight; and the disposition grew larger as time passed. She was stopping at Pimienta Crossing for her health, which was very good, and for the climate, which was forty per cent. hotter than Palestine. I rode over to see her once every week for a while; and then I figured it out that if I doubled the number of trips I would see her twice as often.

“One week I slipped in a third trip; and that’s where the pancakes and the pink-eyed snoozer busted into the game.