"I have a right," she asserted. "Your Dilly—he's a perfect love, and I told him so—said I was to make myself perfectly at home. So I have a perfect right to be here, and a perfect right to hunt eggs; and if I could make that sentence more 'perfect,' I would do it." She tilted her head to one side and challenged a laugh with her eyes.
Charming Billy relaxed a bit, yanked the horse into a stall and tied him fast. "Yuh might tell me how it happened that you're here," he hinted, looking at her over the saddle. He had apparently forgotten that he had intended leaving the horse saddled until he had rested and eaten—and truly it would be a shame to hurry from so unexpected a tête-à-tête.
Miss Bridger pulled a spear of blue-joint hay from a crack in the wall and began breaking it into tiny pieces. "It sounds funny, but Mr. Dill bought father out to get a cook. The way it was, father has been simply crazy to try his luck up in Klondyke; it's just like him to get the fever after everybody else has had it and recovered. When the whole country was wild to go he turned up his nose at the idea. And now, mind you, after one or two whom he knew came back with some gold, he must go and dig up a few million tons of it for himself! Your Dilly is rather bright, do you know? He met father and heard all about his complaint—how he'd go to the Klondyke in a minute if he could only get the ranch and Mama Joy and me off his hands—so what does Dilly do but buy the old ranch and hire Mama Joy and me to come here and keep house! Father, I am ashamed to say, was abjectly grateful to get rid of his incumbrances, and he—he hit the trail immediately." She stopped and searched absently with her fingers for another spear of hay.
"Do you know, Mr. Boyle, I think men are the most irresponsible creatures! A woman wouldn't turn her family over to a neighbor and go off like that for three or four years, just chasing a sunbeam. I—I'm horribly disappointed in father. A man has no right to a family when he puts everything else first in his mind. He'll be gone three or four years, and will spend all he has, and we—can shift for ourselves. He only left us a hundred dollars, to use in an emergency! He was afraid he might need the rest to buy out a claim or get machinery or something. So if we don't like it here we'll have to stay, anyway. We—we're 'up against it,' as you fellows say."
Charming Billy, fumbling the latigo absently, felt a sudden belligerence toward her father. "He ought to have his head punched good and plenty!" he blurted sympathetically.
To his amazement Miss Bridger drew herself up and started for the door. "I'm very sorry you don't like the idea of us being here, Mr. Boyle," she replied coldly, "but we happen to be here, and I'm afraid you'll just have to make the best of it!"
Billy was at that moment pulling off the saddle. By the time he had carried it from the stall, hung it upon its accustomed spike and hurried to the door, Miss Bridger was nowhere to be seen. He said "Hell!" under his breath, and took long steps to the house, but she did not appear to be there. It was "Mama Joy," yellow-haired, extremely blue-eyed, and full-figured, who made his coffee and gave him delicious things to eat—things which he failed properly to appreciate, because he ate with his ears perked to catch the faintest sound of another woman's steps and with his eyes turning constantly from door to window. He did not even know half the time what Mama Joy was saying, or see her dimples when she smiled; and Mama Joy was rather proud of her dimples and was not accustomed to having them overlooked.
He was too proud to ask, at supper time, where Miss Bridger was. She did not choose to give him sight of her, and so he talked and talked to Dill, and even to Mama Joy, hoping that Miss Bridger could hear him and know that he wasn't worrying a darned bit. He did not consider that he had said anything so terrible. What had she gone on like that about her father for, if she couldn't stand for any one siding in with her? Maybe he had put his sympathy a little too strong, but that is the way men handle each other. She ought to know he wasn't sorry she was there. Why, of course she knew that! The girl wasn't a fool, and she must know a fellow would be plumb tickled to have her around every day. Well, anyway, he wasn't going to begin by letting her lead him around by the nose, and he wasn't going to crumple down on his knees and tell her to please walk all over him.
"Well, anyway," he summed up at bedtime with a somewhat doubtful satisfaction, "I guess she's kinda got over the notion that I'm so blame comfortable—like I was an old grandpa-setting-in-the-corner. She's got to get over it, by thunder! I ain't got to that point yet; hell, no! I should say I hadn't!"