"You're a damn, worthless, trifling cowhand and you'll never be anything different. I ought to fire you—ought to of done it long ago; but I fire my own men—they don't fire theirselfs. Go eat."
"Can't you eat none now, too, Colonel?" I ast him.
"Not yet," says he. "Maybe after a while."
I went out and got the first square meal I'd had for two days. When I couldn't eat no more right then, I sort of taken a pasear around the house, which was looking like hell by now. When I come back I seen a electric brougham out at our front yard. Tom Kimberly was just coming in. Out in the brougham I seen two girls. One was Katherine and the other seemed like it was Sally Henderson.
"I shan't try to say anything, Mr. Wright," says Tom Kimberly after a while to the old man—"only, whatever Bonnie Bell's done, she's done because she's thought it was best. She's tried to do what was honest and fair. If she didn't love me it wouldn't have been fair to marry me. She never said she'd marry me; she said she'd tell me sometime. It was her right to decide for herself. I wish her well, hard as that is for me to say."
"Yes; I know," says the old man. "She was a fine girl, Tom. But she ain't the only one in the world at that; and she had freckles, some—they get worse when they get old. There's plenty girls in the world handsomer'n her—always is plenty. If I hadn't happened to marry her ma, Tom, I'd of married any other of half a dozen more girls, like, just as they come along. They're all alike, anyways, you see; so don't take it hard."
He was a damn old liar! He never would of married no other woman in the world but the one he did marry, and he knew it; but he was trying to make Tom feel more comfortable. So Tom he set there and lit a cigarette. His trousers was right short, and when he hitched 'em up I seen he wore garters—blue ones. I was reconciled then.
After a time he got up and said good-by to us. Then he went out to where the brougham was standing in the street. One of the girls inside opened the door for him to get in—maybe Sally Henderson.