"I declare that stew's no fit food for a man, Hetty. Can't we never have nothing else?"
"You've had stew twice in three weeks. That's what you've had," Hetty returned, bridling. "What's got into you, anyhow? You're worse than a big ol' bear."
"Ugh-ugh-ugh-ugh!" her son growled, making a persistent effort to worry his father's leg with his teeth. Lafe pried his offspring loose and set him on his knee. The boy wrestled and thumped him, and gradually Lafe softened under the play.
"I mind once, me and Buf'lo went for eleven days on jerky and tobacco; more tobacco than jerky," he said, considering his son with a smile. "Nothing ever seemed to hurt us in them days, me and Buf'lo. Down in the Baccanochi, it was, where we went for some cattle. And of all the sorry steers, you never seen the like, Hetty. Honest, they couldn't throw a shadow. But we got some beef there. I ain't never tasted beef like it since—no, ma'am."
"Ho, haven't you?" Hetty sniffed.
His usual even spirits seemed to return during the after-supper smoke. He sat on the porch and listened to the cows lowing contentedly around the tanks. Some animal went light-footed through the underbrush of the slope opposite, and Lafe, Jr., was morally certain it was a wildcat; but, then, he never failed to detect bears and wolves and mountain lions in the least stirring of a twig. The dark deepened and a coyote yelped against the Cañon's walls. The baby announced his intention of catching the prowler on the morrow with a pinch of salt, and by the exercise of cunning and stealth.
Hetty came out on the porch to fill the canteen and to warn little Lafe that bedtime was close upon him. The boy denied it vehemently.
"I mind once, when me and Buf'lo were sleeping at the ol' Palomino," her husband told her; "just a night like to this it was, and a couple of line riders come along with a deck of cards—"
"That's all you need to say," Hetty said. "You never did understand the game."
Shortly afterward she took the child from his father and put him to bed, Lafe, Jr., howling that he was wide awake and nothing under heaven would make him go. Yet he was asleep in a twinkling. His mother tiptoed out of the room. When she reached the porch, she gave vent to the long sigh a tired woman will give when the day's work is done and she can relax, and she began to rock in the wicker-chair. Her husband was walking meditatively near a tall cottonwood. He appeared to be pacing off the ground.