Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/106

 "Liver or steak?" Louise inquired, trying to look and feel detached and indifferent, as became her profession, but fighting a great deal harder to keep from smiling in the ingenuous young man's face. "I could get you some French fried, if you like them."

"I love 'em!" Tom declared, with such ardent simplicity that the smile could be restrained no longer.

Louise looked up; Tom, still standing beside the chair, tall and bashful and red, looked down. Each smiled into the other's eyes, and both felt more comfortable, the constraint removed, the way to something friendly, even steak and liver, made clear.

"I recommend the steak," said Louise, in advisory tone.

"It'll hit me fine, ma'am," said Tom, hand on the back of the chair as respectfully as if he waited for the roadmaster, or the section boss, or the governor, or somebody equally high and important, to depart. "But I'm not in any kind of a hurry," Tom protested. "You go ahead and get your own supper first."

"Certainly not," Louise returned, so decisively it made the young man start as if Cal Withers had taken a shot at him through the window. "But I'll take it along with you—if you don't mind," Louise proposed, smiling away the confusion her apparently snappish refusal had brought upon him.

"I'll be honored and delighted," said Tom. "I've been wantin' to have a little talk with you ever since you stepped out there in the road—"

"Wait till I bring on the supper," she suggested.