“Perhaps,” laughed Hollis. “But I have been thinking seriously of trying to reach your altitude.”
“Girl willin’?” queried Norton, as they rode down through a little gully, then up to a stretch of plain that brought them to the Coyote trail.
“That’s where I am all at sea,” returned Hollis. He laughed. “I suppose you’ve read Ace’s poem in the Kicker?” He caught Norton’s nod and continued. “Well, Ace succeeded in crowding a whole lot of truth into that effort. Of course you remember the first couplet:
“‘Woman–she don’t need no tooter,
Be she skule ma’am or biscut shooter.”’
he quoted.
“A woman seems to have an intuitive knowledge of man’s mental processes. At least she gauges him pretty well without letting him into the mystery of how she does it. A man can never tell where he will land.” Ace came very near striking the nail on the head when he wrote in the second couplet that:
‘She has most curyus ways about her,
Which leads a man to kinda dout her.’
“And then, knowing man so well, she absolutely refuses to let him know anything of her thoughts. Which again, Ace has noted in this manner:
‘Though lookin’ at her is sure a pleasure;
There ain’t no way to get her measure.
I reckon she had man on the run
A long while before the world begun.’
“That seems to be the exact truth,” he laughed.