A gal. Yas, you need a gal fer a book. And you need the gal if you want t’ be right happy. I knowed that. Pretty soon, I ast, “Have you picked on a gal?”
“Here’s Carlota,” he says. “She’d make a figger fer a book.”
Carlota!–the little skeezicks! Y’ see, she’s aw-ful pretty. Hair blacker’n a stack of black cats. Black eyes, too,–big and friendly lookin’. (That’s where you git fooled–Carlota’s a blend of tiger-cat and bronc; she can purr ’r pitch–take you’ choice.) Her face is just snow white, with a little bit of pink–now y’ see it, now y’ don’t see it–on her cheeks, and a little spot of blazin’ red fer a mouth.
“But what I’m after most now,” he goes on, “is a plot.”
A plot, y’ savvy, is a story, and I got him the best I could find. This was Buckshot’s:
“Boston, this is a blamed enterprisin’ country,–almost any ole thing can happen out here. Did you ever hear tell how Nick Erickson got his stone fence? No? You could put that in a book. Wal, you know, Erickson lives east of here. Nice hunderd and sixty acres he’s got–level, no stones. Wanted t’ fence it. Couldn’t buy lumber ’r wire. Figgered on haulin’ stone, only stone was so blamed far t’ haul. Then,–Nature was accommodatin’. Come a’ earthquake that shook and shook the ranch. Shook all the stones to the top. Erickson picked ’em up–and built the fence.”
But Boston was hard t’ satisfy. So I tried to tell him about Rose and Billy.
“No,” he says; “if they’s one thing them printin’ fellers won’t stand fer it’s a heroine that’s hitched.”
So, then, I branched off on to pore Bud Hickok.
“No,” says Boston, again; “that won’t do. It’s got to end up happy.”