V

I made the dago bed down in here, but he flopped over to breakfast and they've been at it hammer and tongs ever since. "Tinkie tankie ping ping pee-chee-ree-ho-O! Oh! Oho! me-catamiaou-ow-yow." Cougars is kittens to it, but I'm durned ignorant, and I notice that the signor looked on while she washed up.

I didn't sorrow with Kate persuading me to drive them as far as Hundred Mile. The sound of her voice stampedes me every time, but when the dago tries to stroke my ears, he was too numerous, so I held his head in the bucket until he began to subside. I don't take to him a whole lot.

From when I'd finished the horses, till nigh on sundown, the music tapered off, and I got more and more rattled. At last I walked right in.

She'd a black dress, indecent round the shoulders, and a bright star on her brow. She stood with the swine's arms around her, until at the sight of me he shrank off, guilty as hell. There was nary a flicker of shame or fear to her, but she just stood there looking so grand and beautiful that my breath caught in my throat. "Why, Jesse," she said, her voice all soft with joy, "I'm so glad you've come to see. It's the great scene, the renunciation. Come, Salvator, from 'Thy people shall be—'"

I twisted him by the ear into my cabin, he talking along like a gramophone. I set him down on the stool, myself on the bunk, inspecting him while I cut baccy, and had a pipe. If I let him fight me with guns, she'd make a hero of him. If I hoofed him into the cold or otherwise wafted him to the dago paradise, she'd make a villain of me.

"You wrote an opery," says I.

He explains with his tongue, his eyes, and both paws waving around for the time it takes to boil eggs. I'm not an egg.

"You give the leading woman a base voice?"

He boiled over some more.

"So you got an excuse for coming."

He spread out over the landscape.

"Thinkin'," sez I, "that she'd nothin' more than Trevor to guard her honor."

More talk.

"But you found her married with a man."

He wanted to go alone to civilization.

"You stay here," I says, "and Salvator, you're going to earn your board."