Ellis and me wanted to warm up the old bunk-house, and take her down there, but old Shooting-star wouldn’t stand for it. He said this was his home, and consequently her home, and here’s where she belonged, and had got to stay, so long as she lived with him. Shooting-star’s easy, if yuh don’t get him roused up; but once he bows his neck, he can’t be neither coaxed nor drove.
So then she got fighty, and said she never would live in such a crazy-looking place, and he must uh been crazy to build it. And they got to passing remarks back and forth, and pretty soon Ellis and me took a sneak. We didn’t feel that we ought to be present at no such domestic crisis. We went out and set in the kitchen, with our feet in the oven, and waited for the returns; but we didn’t say much. Only once I says: “Shooting-star sure needs killing, anyway, for bringing a white woman into such a house and trying to make her gentle down and stay here.”
By and by she hollers for us, and we hot-footed into the parlor again. She was still on the couch, setting squeezed into a corner with her face covered up with her hands.
“If you are gentlemen,” she says, kinda teary and trembly, “you’ll help me get back to that little town, and away from this dreadful, insane person, and this dreadful, insane place. And I hope the Lord will forgive me for doing such a foolish thing as to marry him.”
Ellis and me looked grave, and told her the team was still hooked up, and we’d take her, if she insisted.
Shooting-star laughed savage. “Yes, and yuh can’t take her a darned bit too quick to suit me,” he grunts. “Anybody that can’t see the beauty and comfort of this domicile, there’s sure something wrong with that person’s head, and they can’t pull their freight too soon,” he says, and walks, dignified, out into the kitchen. So Ellis and me drove her back to Bent Willow; and seeing she didn’t have much money—as we found out by questioning her artful—we borrowed fifty dollars, and made her take it.
That was sure a brief honeymoon—for she never come back. Her year uh residence was up a couple uh months ago, and soon as it was, she sued him for a divorce and fifty a month alimony, and got it. The court come out and looked at the Hall uh Mirth, and went back and wrote out the decree immediate. So now she’s back in Plumville, Illinois, living comfortable off that fifty a month.
And Shooting-star’s praying for good years and top prices for beef, and cursing female women promiscous. And I notice he don’t make no kick about the cooking.
Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the January 1907 issue of The Popular Magazine.