Page:Raymond Spears--Diamond Tolls.djvu/65

 tried for shooting folks. I never did get to be. But I never talked none. Don't say a word to those boys outside! They're the darndest gossips from Cairo to The Passes. Course, it'd be better, if men kinda knowed you'd shot a fresh fellow. But after you've looked at them, they'll know you'll shoot fast enough. Course, you're pretty—prettiest girl I've seen dropping down alone in five or six years. Course, there's pretty girls drop down, but they're married ladies mostly, and they have folks with them. But you're alone! That's what got me. No man with you! Honest, you'd ought to have some kind of a man along, if it wa'n't more than a ten-year-old boy. They're a heap of company, on the average, s'pecially the right ones. Still, take a good dog now"

"I don't want a dog," Delia sniffed, "much less a man!"

"Oh, that's the tune you play, is it? Well, everybody to his own biting, as the man said when he bit his tongue. I was just telling you. No 'fence, of course. I've lived alone, and I've had husbands and sons and boarders, and I come to the conclusion a man's of some consequence even if he is kind of sickening. Well, they got that anchor up."

The two women went out to the bow deck and saw the boats drifting out into the main current, hitched three abreast, with the cruiser in the centre. Roy