“What brought him here, Jim?”
“You, Miss Taisie! You bring ’em all here. Trouble is, all that comes is dead broke; no more’n a saddle and a pair of spurs to their name. But the McMasters family ain’t broke.
“Now, one thing is shore, Miss Taisie: This here can’t go on forever. I ain’t no good at advice to womenfolks; all I can advise is cows and caballos. But it looks plain to me that before long, you being a orphant, you got to be married to some kind of a man. Peaceable ef we can, by force ef we must, it looks plain to me, which am both yore paw and maw, Miss Taisie, we got to get you-all married. It can’t no ways run on this way much furder’n what it has.”
A dimple came in each of Anastasie Lockhart’s brown cheeks.
“Well, Jim?”
“But not to this man, no matter what he do, Miss Taisie! Not till I can clean up my own mind. I’m oncertain on him somehow. Friends and neighbors he ought to be—shore he ought. But Calvin McMasters, his dad, was agin slavery and secession, and your paw was with the South he was raised in. Them two was friends. I wouldn’t call the McMasterses damn Yankees. But I can’t place him yet.
“Now, how about Del Williams? You know he’s been waiting and hoping. He went to the war because you wouldn’t. He hung on with old Kirby Smith to the last, wondering ef you would. He’s come back after the surrender, hoping you would. He’s a good honest boy, that wears one gun one way and saves his money, when he gets any. He’s a good segundo and he knows cows.”
“Is that all I may ask?”
The girl’s voice was almost wistful. True, she was of the border. But she had seen the wider world. There were books on shelves in that very room. The portraits of her father and her mother were faces of aristocrats. Their lives had been those of adventurers. To know cows? Was that all the husband of the daughter of these two needed to possess?
“Miss Taisie, cows is all we got—and we ain’t got them.”