“And I fergot to tell you that somebody’s ‘salted’ over in Burnt Basin,” he answered, turning back. “There’s a hunerd head o’ cattle eatin’ off the feed there. We’ll need that, later.”
“Tsch! tsch!” Kate frowned her annoyance at the information.
“Be sure and warn Neifkins’s herder as soon as you can get around to it,” she reminded him.
“You bet!” Bowers responded cheerfully, and went on.
Yes, she certainly would miss Bowers if anything happened that he left her, she thought as she turned inside to her market report and her letters.
It was days, however, before Bowers found the opportunity to go to Dibert’s camp with supplies and incidentally warn Neifkins’s herder, if he was still crowding. Now as he jolted towards the fluttering rag, thrust in a pile of rocks to mark the location of Dibert’s sheep-wagon, his thoughts, for once, were not of sheep or anything pertaining to them. He was, forsooth, composing for the matrimonial paper an advertisement which should be sufficiently attractive to draw a few answers without making himself in any way liable. He thought he might with safety say that he was a single gentleman, crowding forty, interested in the sheep industry, who would be pleased to correspond with a plump blonde of about thirty. He would not go so far as to say that his object was matrimony, since, of course, it was not, and the declaration might somehow prove incriminating. The Denver Post was full of suits for breach of promise and it behooved him to be wary.
Bowers felt like a fox, at the adroit wording of the advertisement, and chuckled at his cunning. He would notify the postmaster in Prouty to hold out his mail for him and thus escape further “joshing” from Kate, who would be sure to observe letters addressed to him in feminine writing.
The matrimonial paper had proved to be in the nature of a debauch to Bowers, who had worn it to tatters poring over its columns. The “petite blondes” and “dashing brunettes” who enumerated their charms without any noticeable lack of modesty furnished food for his imagination. He selected brides, as the description pleased him, with the prodigal abandon of a sultan.
However, the idea of an advertisement of his own, dismissed promptly at first, grew upon him. The thought of getting something in the mail besides a catalogue and the speeches of his congressman, of having something actually to look forward to, appealed to him strongly the more he considered it. Bowers craved a little of the warmth of romance in his drab existence and this was the only way he knew of obtaining it.
Smiling at the brash act he contemplated, Bowers threw the brake mechanically as the front wheels of the wagon sank into a chuck-hole and the jolt all but landed him on the broad rump of Old Peter.