“You like dat white woman better den me?” she burst out as he entered.
“Prairie Flower,” he replied wearily, “if I had a dollar for every time I’ve answered that question, I wouldn’t be lookin’ for no stake to buy cattle with.”
“De white woman couldn’t give you no stake.”
He made no reply to her taunt. He was thinking. The words of a cowpuncher came back to him as he sat and regarded with unseeing eyes the Indian woman. The cowpuncher had said: “When a feller rides the range month in and month out, and don’t see nobody but other punchers and Injuns, some Mary Moonbeam or Sally Star-eyes begins to look kind of good to him when he rides into camp and she smiles as if she was glad he had come. He gits used to seein’ her sittin’ on an antelope hide, beadin’ moccasins, and the country where they wear pointed-toed shoes and sit in chairs gits farther and farther away. And after awhile he tells himself that he don’t mind smoke and the smell of buckskin, and a tepee is a better home nor none, and that he thinks as much of this here Mary Moonbeam or Sally Star-eyes as he could think of any woman, and he wonders when the priest could come. And while he’s studyin’ it over, some white girl cuts across his trail, and, with the sight of her, Mary Moonbeam or Sally Star-eyes looks like a dirty two-spot in a clean deck.” The cowpuncher’s words came back to Smith as though they had been said only yesterday.
“Why don’t you say what you think?” the woman asked, uneasy under his long stare.
“No,” said Smith, rousing himself; “the Schoolmarm couldn’t give me no stake; and money talks.”
“When you want your money?”
“Quick.”
“How much you want?”
“How much you got?” he asked bluntly. He was sure of her, and he was in no mood to finesse.