To a bachelor of long standing, adjustment to married life brings with it certain brain shocks and sudden vistas. It is constantly unfolding surprises that burst on his vision as wonders. So many shifts of their household arrangements struck Lafe as unique that he could not forbear mention of them to his friends in Badger—with the air of a discoverer, confident that nothing like this had ever been done or attempted before in history. Whereupon they would emit merry jeers and the older men would assure him that he would soon be harness-broken.
But the greatest change was in his outlook on life, in the new perspective and the new responsibilities that the married state opened to him. A year before, the sheriff would have chafed at any restraint which prohibited enjoyment with his friends after the fashion of the country. Now, he willingly abandoned all his former boon companions whom he chanced to meet, and did not do it with a sense of righteousness for having lived up to his duty, but cheerfully, gladly, because their companionship seemed now stale and flat and purposeless. And he was always anxious to get home.
"Don't you lose none of them parcels, sheriff," they would chaff, standing on the sidewalk to watch Johnson tie his purchases to the saddle.
"Has she done begun to cut your hair yet, Lafe?" another inquired.
Johnson would grin comfortably, and with an "Adios, you fellers," ride off towards Hope Cañon. Invariably he brought a present for Hetty. Everything pretty that he saw struck him as a possible gift for her, so that their home waxed in comfort.
In his blighted days of singleness, Lafe had often taken hearty amusement out of the simple fact that some among his married friends were obliged to rise at unearthly hours in order to light fires and do household chores which he considered to be within the feminine province. On the first mornings of their residence in the new home, he performed these tasks as a loving attention. Of course, ever after he had to do them as a duty. Once a man does a thing, he establishes a precedent which a conscientious individual finds it hard to break—but, bless you, Lafe would never have permitted Hetty to do jobs of this sort, that were within his own powers of performance. So he helped cheerily as dishwasher and assistant housemaid, this gunfighting sheriff of Badger.
Yet Lafe did not emerge wholly scatheless from the ill customs of a lifetime. On a day, old man Horne sent him to Badger in company of a cattle buyer, with whom Horne was making a deal that ran into hundreds of thousands of dollars. And his orders were that Johnson was to get the buyer drunk and keep him in that enviable condition as long as he could. This is considered legitimate in the cow country and "good business."
Lafe did so. And in the course of his enthusiastic labors, he took on a cargo which he found some difficulty in storing. The night of his return, Johnson, as he rode up Hope Cañon, sang a ditty which were best forgotten by a respectable married man.
The house was in darkness, and when he would have entered their bedroom, he found the door locked.
"This ain't no time to get mad," Lafe said warily, winking into the dark, and went to sleep on one of the bunks.