“Oh, it didn’t hurt her much,” said Dad. “Scalded one side of her till she peeled off and turned white. I couldn’t stand her after that. You know a man don’t want to be goin’ around with no pinto woman, John.” Dad looked up with a gesture of depreciation, a queer 141 look of apology in his weather-beaten face. “She was a Crow,” he added, as if that explained much that he had not told.
“Dark, huh?”
“Black; nearly as black as a nigger.”
“Little Handful, and so forth, must have thought you gave her a pretty hard deal, anyhow, Dad.”
“I never called her by her full name,” Dad reflected, passing over the moral question that Mackenzie raised. “I shortened her down to Rabbit. I sure wish I had a couple of them sheep-dogs of her’n to give you in place of them you lost. Joan’s a good little girl, but she can’t train a dog like Rabbit.”
“Rabbit’s still up there on the Big Wind waiting for you, is she?”
“She’ll wait a long time! I’m done with Indians. Joan comin’ over today?”
“Tomorrow.”
“I don’t guess you’ll have her to bother with much longer––her and that Reid boy they’ll be hitchin’ up one of these days from all the signs. He skirmishes off over that way nearly every day. Looks to me like Tim laid it out that way, givin’ him a horse to ride and leavin’ me and you to hoof it. It’d suit Tim, all right; I’ve heard old Reid’s a millionaire.”
“I guess it would,” Mackenzie said, trying to keep his voice from sounding as cold as his heart felt that moment.