Dr. Slavens and William Bentley tried for fish, with a total catch between them of one small trout, which was carried in triumph to the place picked upon by Smith for the noonday camp. Smith would not trust the coffee to any hand but his own, and he blackened up the pot shamefully, Mrs. Reed declared.
But what did Smith care for the criticism of Mrs. Reed when he was making coffee for Agnes? What did he care, indeed, for the judgment of the whole world when he was laying out his best efforts to please the finest woman who ever sat beside him on the box, and one for whom he was ready to go any distance, and do any endeavors, to save her from being made a sucker of and taken in and skinned?
It was pleasant there by the river; so pleasant that there was not one of them but voted Wyoming the finest and most congenial spot in the world, with the kindest skies, the softest summer winds, and the one place of all places for a home.
“Yes,” Smith remarked, tossing pebbles into the river from the place where he sat cross-legged on the ground with his pipe, “it takes a hold of you that way. It goes to twenty below in the winter, sometimes, and the wind blows like the plug had popped out of the North Pole, and the snow covers up the sheep on the range and smothers ’em, and you lose all you got down to the last chaw of t’backer. But you stick, some way, 72 and you forgit you ever had a home back in Indiana, where strawberries grow.”
“Why, don’t they grow here?” asked the miller’s wife, holding a bunch of red bullberries caressingly against her cheek.
“I ain’t seen a natural strawberry in fourteen years,” said Smith, more proud than regretful, as if such a long abstinence were a virtue.
“Natural?” repeated Mrs. Reed. “Surely you don’t mean that they manufacture them here?”
“They send ’em here in cans,” explained Smith, “pale, with sour water on ’em no more like real, ma’am, than a cigarette’s like a smoke.”
The men with pipes chuckled their appreciation of the comparison. Horace Bentley, with a fresh cigarette–which he had taken out of a silver case–in his fingers, turned it, quizzically smiling as he struck a match.
“It’s an imitation,” said he; “but it’s good enough for me.”