“If he loves me as he thinks he does, he’ll wait. If it’s only a passing fancy, he’ll get over it in time. I will not permit his attentions now, nor until Donald McAlpin divorces me and gets another wife.”
Captain Ranger’s union with the gentle bride of his choice had been so natural, and their lives together had been so harmonious, despite their many cares and sorrows, that neither of them had ever harbored a thought of living apart from the other. Differences of opinion they had sometimes, and now and then a brief, angry dispute, but the end was always peace; and he remembered now, with a pang of self-reproach, that in all such encounters he, whether right or wrong, had invariably gained his point.
“You are my guiding star, my faithful wife,” he whispered, as he gently assisted her from the wagon after they had halted for the night. “Come with me, dear, and get some exercise, while Sally and Susannah help the other girls to get supper.”
“I don’t see why we mightn’t end our journey here, John,” said his wife, as they gazed abroad over the vast expanse of table-land that stretched away on every side, intersected here and there with streams, their courses marked by stately rows of cottonwood just bursting into leaf, their bases hedged with pussy-willows. “Here are land and wood and water as good as any we passed yesterday. This surely will be a rich and thickly settled country some day.”
“But it is all Indian country, my dear. I wish you would talk about something else.”
They returned to the camp in silence.
“I wish the girls were as tractable as you are, Annie,” he said an hour later, after having had a heated dispute with his daughters over some trifling disagreement. “They are as headstrong as mules.”
“Being girls, they take after you, John,” replied his wife, with a smile. “I’m afraid their husbands won’t find them as tractable as I have been.”
“Bring on more of your flapjacks and bacon, Miss Mary,” cried Scotty, as Mary poised a big pile of the steaming cakes over the heads of the hungry men who knelt at the mess-boxes.
“You seem to be regaining your lost appetite,” exclaimed Sawed-off. “Have you and the widder cried quits?”