Page:Max Brand--The Seventh Man.djvu/154

140 “Maybe I am. Them hard, snappy lookin' girls are the ones that smash. They're brittle, that's why; but you take a soft lookin' girl like Kate, maybe she ain't a diamond point to cut glass, but she's tempered steel that'll bend, and bend, and bend, and then when you wait for it to break it flips up and knocks you down. That's Kate.”

Lee Haines rolled a cigarette in silence. He was too disgusted to answer, until his first puff of smoke dissolved Buck in a cloud of thin blue.

“You ought to sing to a congregation instead of to cows, Buck. You have the tune, and you might get by in a church; but cows have sense.”

“Kate will buckle and bend and fade for a while,” went on Buck, wholly unperturbed, “but just when you go out to pick daisies for her you'll come back and find her singing to the stove. Her strength is down deep, like some of these outlaw hosses that got a filmy, sleepy lookin' eye. They save their hell till you sink the spurs in 'em. You think she loves Dan, don't you?”

“I have a faint suspicion of it,” sneered Haines. “I suppose I'm wrong?”

“You are.”

“Buck, I may have slipped a nickel into you, but you're playing the wrong tune. Knock off and talk sense, will you?”

“When you grow up, son, you'll understand some of the things I'm tryin' to explain in words of one syllable.