Page:Sheep Limit (1928).pdf/71

 else. Rawlins wondered if she counted her money with one eye shut to keep the other from seeing how much she had, her sheepman-caution seemed so preposterously extreme.

"So you come out here to this country with it all planned out to be a sheepman?" Mrs. Duke said, as they rejoined Edith and walked slowly toward the house. "It's a shame that fence of Galloway's was in your way, but maybe it saved you time and money, after all."

"That's what I concluded after talking with Clemmons," Rawlins admitted.

"It'll not always be there in people's way," Edith said, with positiveness that seemed portentous. "A man will come along here one of these days big enough to make Galloway move his fence—or he'll move it for him."

"Somebody you've been writin' to?" Mrs. Duke suggested, letting Rawlins into the joke by a sly, slow wink.

Edith made no answer to this banter, although she flushed and turned her head as if resenting the introduction of a stranger into her private affairs. Mrs. Duke was not sensitive in the matter at all, nor conscious of any reservation of delicacy.

"That's what took her to the post office this morning, riskin' her neck cuttin' that fence," she said.

"Oh, Aunt Lila! You know we were out of coffee."

"She's got a mail-order beau, away back in Saint Joe, Missouri. She never set eyes on him in her life," Mrs. Duke continued in unfeeling revelation of the family secret, as much to Rawlins' distaste as to the girl's.