Page:Short Grass (1926).pdf/102

 been married to Brassfield, traipsin' around lookin' for a better place than the one I was at. I don't see why a young man like you wants to leave a country where you can grown roastin' years and snap beans to come out here and rummage your livin' out of tin cans."

"Corn and beans'd grow here, right here in this valley, if anybody had sense enough, and git-up enough, to plant 'em," Brassfield said.

"If they wait on you to do it they'll never see it done," she said placidly, not a shade of accusation or mockery in her tone.

"If I had the land I'd show 'em," Brassfield declared. "But a pore man's got about as much show of gittin' him a piece of land in this valley as he has of findin' him a gold-mind. These rich cattlemen they've spraddled all over the country, grabbin' and stealin' till a pore man ain't got—"

"Lord love you, Mr. Dunhan, it don't pay to roam around," Mrs. Brassfield broke in, serenely indifferent to her husband's effort to excuse his own trifling habits in the indictment of more enterprising men, a human weakness so general and so mean that it deserved squelching, just as Mrs. Brassfield squelched Shad, by passing over him as if he was not there.

There was so little of Brassfield above the ears with his hat off that Dunham would have been slow to accept him as an authority without Mrs. Brassfield's 'calm demonstration of how a cipher should be placed in the sum of human consequence. Brassfield had his hair cut short all over his head, which came to a point at the top as if it had been tied in a pudding-cloth and