Belle stared at him: "Where would I sleep if I did?" she demanded.
John threw back his head, blew a delicate puff of smoke toward the ceiling and looked across at his unsympathetic hostess. Then he brought his fist down on the table; "Marry me, Belle, and sleep in a regular bed! What?"
Belle was justly indignant. Kate's laughing made her more indignant. For John had fairly bubbled his proposal through a laugh of his own.
"I used to sleep in a box like that myself," he went on. "But the year it was so dry the grasshoppers got into it." John coughed again unobtrusively. "I raffled that bed off," he continued, low and reminiscently. "A conductor won it. But it didn't fool him. He knew the bed as well as I did; he'd slept in it. So I bought it in again, cheap, and traded it to an old Indian buck—a one-eyed man—for a pony. Many a time I've laughed, thinking of that bed up on the Reservation. Those bucks, you know, are desperate gamblers. I understand they've been playing hearts with that blamed bed ever since and putting it on the high man."
At this, John laughed harder than ever, Belle sputtering as she watched him.
Then he turned his amiable face on Kate: "How are you all at the home?"
"Very well."
"What's the news up your way?"
"Not a thing since the Fourth of July."
"Father pretty well?"