Peanut had disappeared among the bushes.
III
THE Rose of Texas sat in the open door of her cabin. The Rose might have been beautiful once—it is proper to give any woman past middle age the benefit of this possibility—and there may have been a time when the Rose had deserved her name and been fully equal in value to the Colt .44, three ponies, and five hundred dollars in gold which Sam had stacked up against her, and so, with the aid of three other knaves, attached her to his household. On a stone a few feet distant sat Peanut, in deep reverie. The Rose was first to break the silence.
“I reckon it’s the best thing for you, Peanut,” she said, and there was a sort of resolute hopelessness in her voice. “It’ll be mighty lonesome, of course, without you, but when you get so you can write you can send me a letter now and then. I guess I can read ’em. I ain’t tried any for a good while, but if you make ’em plain, mebbe I can spell ’em out. It’s a good chance, Peanut, an’ I don’t s’pose you’d ever get another. Then you’ll learn figgerin’, too.”
“What’s that, Rose? What’s figgerin’?”
“Why, it’s like writin’, only it’s countin’, on paper. It’s to keep folks from cheatin’ you, in a trade.”
Peanut recalled his experience with the boy at the mines. The boy probably knew about figgerin’.
“How long does it take to learn figgerin’, Rose?”
“Oh, I dun’no’. Mebbe a year.”