Harford it was who strode forward with demand. “What’s the big idea, Pape? You trying to make a spectacle of us for the benefit of the neighbors?”
Pape answered them inclusively. “No pet cow knocks at your gates, but a steer rounded up and cut-out at Mrs. Sturgis’ request. Is the lady in?”
“Aunt Helene? Impossible!”—Jane, with a gasp for exclamation point.
“Ignore the practical joker,” urged Harford. “Let’s leave him to do his ridiculous worst and go on with our ride.”
Ignore him, eh? The word interested the Westerner. That was what he had decided to do to the claims of Irene. But one attempt promised to be about as successful as the other to judge by the clutch of resentment within him and the clutch of that young woman’s fingers upon his arm. He faced another moment when heart’s ease and fate hung upon a thread of most uncertain feminine spin.
CHAPTER XXI—IGNORING IRENE
In her self-sufficient egoism Irene Sturgis had no mercy. She continued to ravel the thread.
“At times, dar-rling, you get too terribly eccentric for even me to—to swallow.” She gulped at the midway modified metaphor. “If you’d sent me a bunch of orchids now, by way of suggesting your gratitude for last night’s rescue from limbo, or if you’d brought around a pinkie ring with a birthstone set—diamonds are for April, you know—which mother might let me keep if I coaxed her and explained how it humiliates me always to be borrowing jewelry—I’d not have lifted a questioning lash. But to steer up a ton of beef——”
She paused to survey again the bulk of his assumed gift, but not long enough for successful interruption. “Still, one shouldn’t look a gift-cow in the mouth, I suppose. What does one feed her—him, Why-Not, and where will it sleep? His eyes are so wild, poor pretty, she looks as if it hadn’t had a good night in a week. Nice moo-moo—nice bossy!”
Despite her liberty with genders, none of her hearers failed to grasp her meaning.