Captain Adams walked out a piece as if musing. Daniel pressed beside him, talking eagerly. His voice reached me.
“She’s powerful purty, ain’t she, paw! Gosh, I never seen a woman in britches before. Did yu? Paw! She kin ride in my wagon, paw. Be yu goin’ to take her on, paw? If yu be, I got room.”
“Go. Tend to your stock and think of other things,” boomed his father. “Remember that the Scriptures say, beware of the scarlet woman.”
Daniel galloped away, whooping like an idiot.
“Wall, there she is,” my friend Jenks remarked non-committally. “What next’ll happen, we’ll see in the mornin’. Either she goes on or she goes back. I don’t claim to read Mormon sign, myself. But she had me jumpin’ sideways, for a spell. So did that young whelp.”
There was some talk, idle yet not offensive. The men appeared rather in a judicial frame of mind: 180 laid a few bets upon whether her husband would turn up, in sober fashion nodded their heads over the hope that he had been “properly pinked,” all in all sided with her, while admiring her pluck roundly denied responsibility for women in general, and genially but cautiously twitted Mr. Jenks and me upon our alleged implication in the affair.
Darkness, still and chill, had settled over the desert—the only discernible horizon the glow of Benton, down the railroad track. The ashes of final pipes were rapped out upon our boot soles. Our group dispersed, each man to his blanket under the wagons or in the open.
“Wall,” friend Jenks again broadly uttered, in last words as he turned over with a grunt, for easier posture, near me, “hooray! If it simmers down to you and Dan’l, I’ll be there.”
With that enigmatical comment he was silent save for stertorous breathing. Vaguely cogitating over his promise I lay, toes and face up, staring at the bright stars; perplexed more and more over the immediate events of the future, warmly conscious of her astonishing proximity in this very train, prickled by the hope that she would continue with us, irritated by the various assumptions of Daniel, and somehow not at all adverse to the memory of her in “britches.”
That phase of the matter seemed to have affected Daniel and me similarly. Under his hide he was human.