“Roast beef, b’iled buffalo tongue, plover potpie, fried antelope steak, an’ baked salt hoss an’ beans!”
Sixty seconds later, the fatuous Rattlesnake still silently staring, Miss Barndollar broke a bread-plate on his head and went her way.
It was like clenching the driven nail—that bread-plate episode. The jolt to his faculties crystallised the love in Rattlesnake which before had been in solution, and he became Miss Barndollar’s slave.
And yet it is no more than justice to the lady to explain that her bread-plate descent upon the spellbound Rattlesnake was the fruit of a misunderstanding. Being unaware of what soft sentiments she had inspired, Miss Barndollar conceived his glances to have been bestowed upon her in mockery. This was shown when she passed the cashier as she swept from the room.
“What was the trouble, Calamity?” asked the cashier, who had witnessed Miss Barndollar’s reproof, without knowing its cause. “What did that jayhawker do?”
“Which he stared at me,” replied the outraged Miss Barndollar. “I’ll teach sech horned toads that if my face is freckled, I’m a lady all the same.”
When and where and how the headlong Rattlesnake found time and place to woo Miss Barndollar went unexplained to Dodge. Its earliest news was when the whisper leaped from lip to lip that Miss Barndollar and Rattlesnake were to wed.
“Is that so, Rattlesnake?” asked Mr. Short, referring to the event as promised by gossip. “Is it straight? You’ll excuse me, Rattlesnake, if I adds that I hopes an’ trusts it is. Dodge wouldn’t stand no triflin’ with the ontried heart of Calamity, an’ if you-all is simply flirtin’ with the affections of that pore girl I wouldn’t fill your moccasins for a small clay farm.”
“Flirtin’,” retorted the scandalised Rattlesnake. “Luke, you insults me! Calamity an’ me is goin’ to hook up followin’ the spring round-up.”
After making this declaration, Rattlesnake, in a kind of ecstatic hysteria at the glowing future before him, withdrew to a corner of the Long Branch and lapsed into a dance which had its rise with the Cheyennes, and was known among its copper coloured authors as the Love Dance of the Catamounts.