Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/61

 When Doctor Dunham arrived he had worked himself into a frenzy.

"What have you been doing to yourself, anyhow?"

"Nothing. Pitched a little hay, that's all."

"Trying to show these cowboys you're as good a man as they are!" chuckled old Dunham, and was rather hurt later when none of old Lucius's liquor was forthcoming.

So the day wore on, Katherine applying hot water bags to Henry's back and occasionally looking at the mountains with that far-away glance of hers. Long ago she had forgotten the dreams and passions of her youth; sometimes it seemed to her that she had always been married to this heavy bodied, occasionally truculent and domineering husband of hers. But for Kay she had had a dream of her own, of love and marriage.

It was vague, like much of her dreaming. She did not care greatly for Herbert; secretly she shared Bessie's opinion of him. But he meant safety. This cowboy If she could only talk to Kay! But she had never overcome the feeling that as to mother and daughter, the gulf between the knowledge of the one and the ignorance of the other was somehow shameful.

She had, this queer Katherine, an odd feeling that if old Lucius had been around he would have known what to do.

Kay stayed in her room all morning. She was frightened and desperate. Never before had she resented the domestic hierarchy under which she lived, but now she did. Her face, when the lunch gong sounded, was hard and sullen, and when before descending she went to her window and once more glanced out in the hope of seeing Tom, what she saw only increased her anger and resentment.

The early midday dinner at the bunk house was over; the long table with its brown oil-cloth cover was deserted. By ones and twos the men came out, to sit on their heels or lounge about, rolling their endless cigarettes. It was the one bit of leisure in their hard-working, hard-riding days. Bill was off by himself, plaintively playing a mouth organ, and near him Tom was standing, over-cheerfully humming