She began rubbing the adherent dough from her arms.
“Just a minute,” she said. “Go soak it in the wash basin—here’s some warm water.” Taking a tea-kettle from the flat-topped stove, she poured into the basin, adding some cold water from the cistern pump.
As Mauney proceeded to follow her advice she rummaged through a cotton bag, hung on the back of the pantry door. “It’ll be all right, Maun,” she cheerfully prophesied. “A cut like that is safe if it bleeds, but if it don’t, watch out!”
She was a well-formed woman of twenty-seven, a trifle masculine about the shoulders, but with a feminine enough face displaying sharp, hazel eyes beneath black, straight brows. Her nose was passably refined, but her full lips wore a careless smile that lent not only a gleam of golden teeth, but a mild atmosphere of coarseness to her face. The excitement of Mauney’s injury had called up circumscribed patches of crimson to her cheeks and accentuated the nervous huskiness of her voice.
“One time,” she continued, while she tore a white cloth into long narrow strips, “my cousin ran a nail in her foot. They got Doc. Horne, and he did—God only knows what—but her foot got the size of a pungkin, only redder.”
“Blood-poisoning?”
“Yep.”
As she rolled two or three crude bandages she glanced occasionally at Mauney, with keen, appraising eyes that followed the stretch of his broad shoulders bent over the sink. As she nervously applied the bandage, a moment later, the sound of boots scraping outside the door contributed an added haste to her manner. Before she had finished, the door opened to admit Seth Bard.
Mauney’s father was of average height, but heavily built, with ponderous shoulders and a thick, short neck. Beneath the broad, level rim of his Stetson the lamp-light showed the full, florid face of a man who continually peered at life through half-closed lids in calloused, self-confident reserve, or as if hiding what men might read in his eyes, if he opened them. He stopped abruptly inside the door, his thumbs caught into the top of his trousers, and stood haughtily still for an instant, the personification of master in his house.
Mauney’s back was turned toward him so that the father could not see the occupation causing such seemingly friendly terms between his son and his hired woman. His narrow eyes studied them in mystification.