“Yes, I think they’ll hitch. Well, I’d like to see Joan land a better man than him. I don’t like a man that can draw a blinder over his eyes like a frog.”
Mackenzie smiled at the aptness of Dad’s comparison. It was, indeed, as if Reid interposed a film like a frog when he plunged from one element into another, so to speak; when he left the sheeplands in his thoughts and went back to the haunts and the companions lately known.
“If Joan had a little more meat on her she wouldn’t be a bad looker,” said Dad. “Well, when a man’s young he likes ’em slim, and when he’s old he wants ’em fat. It’d be a calamity if a man was to marry a skinny girl like Joan and she was to stay skinny all his life.”
“I don’t think she’s exactly skinny, Dad.”
“No, I don’t reckon you could count her ribs. But you put fifty pounds more on that girl and see how she’d look!”
“I can’t imagine it,” said Mackenzie, not friendly to the notion at all.
As Dad went back to unburden himself of his unwelcome companion, Mackenzie could not suppress the thought that a good many unworthy notions hatched beneath that dignified white hair. But surely Dad might be excused by a more stringent moralist than the schoolmaster for abandoning poor Rabbit after her complexion had suffered in the hog-scalding vat.
Toward sundown Earl Reid came riding over, his winning smile as easy on his face as he was in the saddle. The days were doing him good, all around, toughening his face, taking the poolroom pastiness out of it, putting a bracer in his back. Mackenzie noted the improvement as readily as it could be seen in some quick-growing plant.