“Why, do they cut the poor things’ tails off?” she asked, getting the notion that Smith was having a little fun at her expense.
“They all do it,” he informed her, “to keep the sand and burrs out of ’em. If they let ’em.grow long they git so heavy with sand it makes ’em.poor to pack ’em. they say, I don’t know myself; I’m not a sheepman.”
“But why did she shoot a man? Because he cut off lambs’ tails?”
“No, she didn’t,” said Smith. “She went out of her head. The feller she shot was a storekeeper’s son down in Meander, and he got to ridin’ up there to talk to her and cheer her up. The lonesomeness it had such a hold on her, thinkin’ about Omaha and houses, and pie-annos playin’ in every one of ’em, that she up and run off with that feller when he promised to take her 218 back there. They started to cut across to the U.P. in a wagon–more than a hundred miles. That night she come to her head when he got too fresh, and she had to shoot him to make him behave.”
“Her husband should have been shot, it seems to me, for leaving her that way,” Agnes said.
“A man orto stick to his wife in this country, specially if she’s new to it and not broke,” said Smith; “and if I had one, ma’am, I’d stick to her.”
Smith looked at her as he said this, with conviction and deep earnestness in his eyes.
“I’m sure you would,” she agreed.
“And I’d be kind to her,” he declared.
“There’s no need to tell me that,” she assured him. “You’re kind to everybody.”