"Are we somebody, sis?" says Old Man Wright, sudden.
"Dear old dad!" says she, and she kisses him some more. "We'll be somebody before we quit this game—believe me!"
"Curly," says the old man to me soon after, "that girl's got looks—Lord! I didn't know it till I seen her all dressed up the way she is here. She's got class—I don't know where she got it, but she has. She's got brains—Lord knows where she got them; certain not from me. She's got sand too—you can't stop her noways on earth. If she starts she's going through. And she says she only come here because she knew I wanted to!" says he.
"What's the difference?" I ast him. "We fooled her, didn't we?"
"Maybe," says he. "I ain't shore."
Well, anyway, this is what we'd swapped the old days out on the Yellow Bull for. We'd done traded the mountains and the valley and the things we knew for this three or four rooms at several hundred dollars a month in a hotel that looked out over the water, and over a lot of people on the keen lope, not one of them caring a damn for us—leastways not for her pa or me.
III - Us Living in Town
I never had lived in town this long, not in all my life before, and, far as I know, the boss hadn't, neither. We wasn't used to this way of living. We'd been used to riding some every day. Out in the parks, even in the winter, once in a while you could see somebody riding—or thinking they was riding, which they wasn't.
One day Old Man Wright, come spring, he goes down to the stockyards and buys a good saddle horse for Bonnie Bell to ride. It cost him twenty-five dollars a month to keep that horse, so he would eat his head off in about three months at the outside. Old Man Wright tells me that I'll have to ride out with the kid whenever she wanted to go. That suited me. Of course that meant we had to buy another horse for me. That made the stable bill fifty dollars a month. I never did know what we paid for our rooms at the hotel, but it was more every month than would keep a family a year in Wyoming.