“Sam Pretty Cow was saying yesterday––” and Duke repeated a bit of gossip that had a gibe at the Lorrigans for its point. “He got it over to Hitchcocks. It come from the Douglases. I guess Mary Hope don’t want nothing of us––except what she can get out of us. We been a good thing, all right––easy marks.”
Duke had done the least for her and therefore felt qualified to say the most. His last sentence did its work. Tom pulled his eyebrows together, drew his lip between his teeth and leaned back in his chair, thinking deeply, his eyes glittering between his half-closed lids.
“Easy marks, ay?” he snorted. “The Lorrigans have been called plenty of things, fur back as I can remember, but by the humpin’ hyenas, they never was called easy marks before!”
That was Tom’s last comment on the subject. Belle, not liking the look on his face, because she knew quite well what it portended, passed him two kinds of preserves and changed the subject. Al and Duke presently left for the bunk house. Mary Hope’s party and her evident intention to slight the Lorrigans was not mentioned again for days.
But Tom’s wrath was smoldering. He was not 207 hasty. He waited. He himself met Mary Hope in the trail one day, lifted his hat to her without a word and rode on. Mary Hope let him go with a chilly nod and a murmured greeting which was no more than an empty form. Certainly she did not read Tom’s mind, did not dream that he was thinking of the piano,––and from an angle that had never once presented itself to her.
So, now that you see how both were justified in their opinions, as formed from different points of view, let me tell you what happened.
Mary Hope had her picnic, with never a thunderstorm to mar the day. Which is unusual, since a picnic nearly always gets itself rained upon. She had sent out more than a hundred invitations––tickets two dollars, please––and there were more who invited themselves and had to be supplied with tickets cut hastily out of pasteboard boxes that had held sandwiches.
Mary Hope was jubilant. Mother Douglas, as official hostess, moved here and there among the women who fussed over the baskets and placated with broken pieces of cake their persistent offspring. Mother Douglas actually smiled, though her face plainly showed that it was quite unaccustomed to the expression, and tilted the smile downward at the corners. Mother Douglas was a good woman, but she had had little in her life to bring smiles, and her habitual expression was one of mournful endurance.
It was sultry, and toward evening the mosquitoes swarmed out of the lush grass around the spring and set the horses stamping and moving about uneasily. But it was a very successful picnic, with all the chatter, all the gourmandizing, all the gossip, all the childish romping in starched white frocks, all the innocuous pastimes that one expects to find at picnics.