“Tell me, Milly. Don’t be provoking.”
“You never tell me, Robert, what George Durham, and Mr. Simcox, and Wash Hill, and the rest of your companions talk about. You always say, if I ask you, ‘It is not worth telling.’”
But when the evening shadows fell, and we sat outside under the great planets shining above us—and apparently twice the size they appear in more northern latitudes—the sweet influences of the Pleiades were too powerful to resist, and I generally then confided to Robert any touching or amusing incident, that had been talked over by us. But sometimes Orion was in the ascendant, and his binding virtues helped me to keep silence, and to be provoking. It must have been Orion at these times, for there is naturally nothing secretive about me.
Our topics were nearly always strictly local, and men dearly love local topics, for instance there was a very pretty old lady frequently present, no matter where the meeting was held. She was a Mrs. R——, aged about sixty-five, the wife of an old Texan Major who had been in every scrimmage that had occurred between the Trinity and the Rio Grande. He was 209 a hale, handsome man far in his eighties, and had virtually lived with his rifle in his hand—on the whole a rather unmanageable human quantity, except in the hands of his pretty little wife. Being near neighbors she was in my house nearly every day, and perhaps the most welcome visitor we had. She was a Highland Scotch woman, from the city of Perth, still beautiful, and always dressed with piquant suggestion of her native land. Robert paid her great attention, and she sent Robert, three or four days every week, a basin of the Scotch broth he loved so naturally, and to which I had never been able to impart the national flavor.
One day when there was a small gathering in my parlor she joined it. Every one immediately noticed that the pretty pink color of her cheeks had vanished, and that she looked jaded and half-angry. For a moment I thought she was going to cry. Not at all! She flushed pinker than ever, and in an hysterical voice, blended of anger and pity, and the faintest suggestion of laughter, said,
“Ladies, I’m picking my steps over an unkent road. I will not believe that anybody has traveled it afore me.”
“It is the Major, of course!” sighed Mrs. Tannin, shaking her head sadly.
“Yes, Mrs. Tannin, it’s the Major. The man is in perfect agony. He has been raving about his room for three days and nights, and Dr. Alexander says the trouble is like to go on for weeks, or even months.”
“Whatever is the matter, Mrs. R——?” I asked.
“That Comanche arrow, I reckon,” said Mrs. Smith.