Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/234

 he'd stopped at the spring for a drink and I says: 'Well, how about it? Do you want to buy it?' And he says, with the cup in his hand: 'Well, Joe, I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll pay you forty dollars, delivered at my ranch.' 'That suits me,' I says, 'I'll ride him out tomorrow.' 'Ride him!' says he. 'You blamed fool, I'm talking about this spring.

She liked these men. She would hear Tom's halting step in the hall, and he would usher in some sun-burned and abashed individual who would more or less tiptoe into the room.

"Come on in, Hank, and meet the wife," he would say.

Then for a little while he would be his handsome debonair old self. He would throw away his stick and roll a cigarette, and then standing there, tall and smiling, he would seem to fill the little room. Sometimes George brought ice water and Kay made lemonade. The visitor would drink it solemnly.

He was inordinately proud of her, she saw, and she on her part liked these men he brought in. They reeked of the outdoors, their eyes were clear; when they took off their great hats their foreheads were white above the tan and somehow pathetic to her. When they had ridden into town they always stopped outside and took off their spurs. But she was not stupid. She began to see that this new world of hers had no place in it for the weak or the maimed.

But something else had happened to her. Those casual soft-spoken sagas of the range to which Tom listened as one who hears news from home had rebuilt his background for her. Through such a life of grinding hard work, adventure and escape, had he come to her; against this backdrop he once more loomed young and strong and god-like.

She must get him back to it somehow. These weeks in the town were only marking time, as she had suspected Herbert of marking time so long ago. And after a small incident which brought Clare Hamel into the picture, she was more than ever determined.

For the first time in her life she was jealous, not with the light and selfish jealousy of the girl, but with the furious possessive jealousy of a wife.

Considering her day and generation, she was curiously