“And if she didn’t like the name,” Smith went on significantly, “I’d have it changed!”
“I’m sure she’d like it–she’d be very ungrateful if she didn’t,” Agnes replied, somewhat amused by his earnestness, but afraid to show it. “I’m going to order lumber for my house in a day or two.”
Smith switched from sentiment to business in a flash.
“Let me sell you the nails,” he requested. “I can give ’em to you as cheap as you can git ’em in Meander.”
CHAPTER XIV
“LIKE A WOLF”
Agnes had been on her homestead almost a week. She was making a brave “stagger,” as Smith described all amateurish efforts, toward cutting up some dry cottonwood limbs into stove-lengths before her tent on the afternoon that Jerry Boyle rode across the ford.
While she had not forgotten him, she had begun to hope that he had gone back to Comanche, and his sudden appearance there gave her an unpleasant shock. He drew up near her with a friendly word, and dismounted with a cowboy swing to his long body and legs.
“Well, Agnes, you dodged me in Meander,” said he. “You’ve located quite a piece up the river and off the stage-road, haven’t you?”
“But not far enough, it seems,” she answered, a little weariness in her voice, as of one who turns unwillingly to face at last something which has been put away for an evil day.