“Nope,” he said with a weak-minded grin. “I d-don’t never worry much about the women folks, so I don’t!” He was a small-bodied, but wiry, individual of perhaps forty-five, with a scranny, wry neck and a burnished face of unsymmetrical design. The cervical deformity tilted his head sidewise and gave him an appearance of being in a constant attitude of listening, as if an unseen, but shorter, person were always beside him whispering in his ear. When he spoke he snapped his eyelids as if he alertly appreciated the full significance of his environment, and was perpetually on guard against the wiles of his associates.
“Hold on, Snowball!” William said, across the table, with a glare of mock earnestness, as he reached to sink his knife into the butter. “You know you’re lyin’. All the pretty gals up to Beulah is crazy about you.”
Snowball laughed a silent, internal kind of laugh that caused his shoulders to rise and fall in rapid jerks to its rhythm, and ended in its first audible accompaniment—a sound exactly like the suction of a sink-basin drawing in the last eddying portion of water.
“The gals is g-gone on you, Bill, not me!” he retorted, with much keen winking of his lids, and entered immediately on a second bout of noiseless, private laughter which terminated, after the others had forgotten his remarks, in the same astonishing sound.
“D’juh see the bay mare to-day, Bill?” Bard presently inquired, across the level of a wide slice of bread, from which he had bitten out a semi-circular portion. William looked up knowingly from his well-loaded fork and nodded his head sagely with a slight lifting of his brows, as though an intimate understanding existed.
“I should say so. What are you going to do with her, Dad?” he asked.
Bard’s slit-like eyes narrowed even more than usual, as for a moment, he chewed meditatively.
“Goin’ to get rid of her,” he said, with the careless quickness of one pronouncing expert opinion. “Sorry I raised her, Bill. Never liked her sire. Thompson never had much luck with that Percheron stud. He’s been leadin’ that horse around down the Clark Settlement, and I seen some o’ the colts. All the same!”
“What’s the matter with the bay mare?” Mauney enquired anxiously.
“She’s goin’ to be sold—that’s what’s the matter with her!” he replied curtly. “And I don’t want to hear no growlin’, understand me!”