Page:Sheep Limit (1928).pdf/133

 nine days after leaving it. Edith came running from the house to welcome them, frisking about altogether too gay and light-footed for a reluctant bride, Rawlins thought. Tippie had the same thing moving in his mind, as his first words revealed.

"I see you ain't married," he said.

"Me? I'm farther from it than ever," she laughed.

"Where's he gone?" Tippie inquired, keeping his seat on the wagon, foot on the brake, looking down at her with such stern face and eye of judgment as if to try her on the charge of making away with Dowell Peck.

"I don't know whether to laugh or cry," she replied, in words that did not answer him in the least. "Here—look at this."

She handed him a bit of paper, which Tippie unfolded and read, passing it along to Rawlins without a line of his rueful face softening or hardening, no more change in it, indeed, than a picture of H. Clay on a revenue stamp.

It was a childish-looking piece of writing, immature, uncertain. Rawlins read:

"Well, I'll be ditched!" said Tippie.

Rawlins, standing by the wagon wheel, clung to it and turned loose the charge of laughter that had been accumulating in his chest ever since the arrival of Peck in the sheeplands. The humor of this mail-order romance had grown during their absence until it had