“She’s never impressed me as being flabby,” he ventured, with a quietness which only a person who knew him would or could recognize as dangerous.
“Well, I don’t share your admiration for her,” I retorted, letting the tide of vitriol carry me along in its sweep.
Dinky-Dunk’s face hardened.
“Then what do you intend doing about it?” he demanded.
That was a poser, all right. That was a poser which, I suppose, many a woman at some time in her life has been called on to face. What did I intend doing about it? I didn’t care much. But I at least intended to save the bruised and broken hulk of my pride from utter annihilation.
“I intend,” I cried out with a quaver in my voice, “since you’re not able to fill the bill, to be head of this household myself.”
“That sounds like an ultimatum,” said Dinky-Dunk very slowly, his face the sickly color of a meerschaum-pipe bowl.
“You can take it any way you want to,” I passionately proclaimed, compelled to raise my voice to the end that it might surmount Pee-Wee’s swelling cries. “And while you’re being lackey for Lady Alicia Newland I’ll run this ranch. I’ll run it in my own way, and I’ll run it without hanging on to a woman’s skirt!”
Dinky-Dunk stared at me as though he were looking at me through a leper-squint. But he had been brutal, was being brutal. And it was a case of fighting fire with fire.
“Then you’re welcome to the job,” I heard him proclaiming out of his blind white heat of rage. “After that, I’m through!”