All these plans Larkin learned from Juliet and her mother, who looked after most of his wants. The latter, good woman, quite flustered at having what she termed a “regular boarder,” became rather fond of the patient young man from the East who never failed to listen attentively to her narrative of the famous trip to St. Paul.
The regular boarder, for his part, could not but sympathize with this homely, hard-working, lonely woman. One rarely connected Martha Bissell with old Beef Bissell except in an impersonal way, as one would have connected the corral, or the barn, or the brand. In fact, the cowman seemed hardly cognizant of her existence, long since having transferred all the affections his hard life had left him to the daughter he worshiped.
But Martha, as is so often the case with women who grow old slaving for their husbands, had not changed in her devotion to Bissell since the proud day they had eloped on one horse and been married by a “sky pilot” in the nearest cow town.
Mrs. Bissell had come to that dolorous time in a woman’s life when she no longer has the power of attracting male attention—which power is not 138 a matter of age, but merely of mind and spirit. And yet there were depths in her, Larkin found, unsuspected because unsought.
Loving her daughter as she loved her husband, she derived a certain negative happiness from the fact that their exclusive companionship brought them pleasure.
For herself she asked nothing, and, as is the way of the world, she got it.
For Bud Larkin, who had only known her as an angular, uninteresting addendum of the Bar T, she took on a certain pathetic interest, and he went out of his way to talk with her about the glories of Chicago, since her one dissipation seemed to be mental journeys back East.
Larkin was not strictly a prisoner at the Bar T ranch-house, for this had been found impracticable from a number of standpoints. He had the run of the ranch, an old, decrepit cow pony to ride, and could go in any direction he chose under the supervision of a cowboy who carried a Winchester and was known to have impaled flies on cactus spines at thirty yards.
Occasionally Bud and Juliet rode out together, with this man in the rear, and renewed the old friendship that had lain dormant for so long. During one of these rides the girl, after debating 139 the matter with herself, opened on a delicate subject.
“That Caldwell man is a strange-looking fellow, Bud. Who is he?”