“Mary’s a little bit of all right, Dad.”
“Yes, and not such a little bit, either. Mary’s some chunk of a girl; she’ll grow up to a woman that suits my eye. You could do worse than set your cap for that little lady, it seems to me, John.”
“Any man could. She’s got a lively eye, and wise head, too, if I’m not away off.”
“She looks soft when you first glance her, but she’s as deep as a well. Mary ain’t the build of a girl that fools a man and throws him down. Now, you take Joan, a kind of a high-headed touch-me-not, with that gingerbread hair and them eyes that don’t ever seem to be in fifty-five mile of you when you’re talkin’ to her. I tell you, the man that marries her’s got trouble up his sleeve. He’ll wake up some morning and find her gone off with some other man.”
“What makes you think that, Dad?”
“Not satisfied with what she’s got, always lookin’ off over the hill like a breachy cow calculatin’ on how much better the grazin’d be if she could hop the fence and go 259 tearin’ off over there. Joan ain’t the kind that settles down to nuss babies and make a man a home. Mary is. That’s the difference between them two girls.”
“Maybe you’re right about it, Dad––I expect you are. You ought to know women if any man does.”
“Well, neither one of ’em ain’t a woman in the full meanin’ of the word,” Dad reflected, “but they’ve got the marks on ’em of what they’ll turn out to be. The man that marries Mary he’ll play safe; the feller that gits Joan takes on a gamble. If she ever does marry Reid he’ll not keep her seven months. Shucks! I married a red-headed woman one time back in Oklahomey, and that blame woman run off with a horse-doctor inside of three months. I never did hear tell of that fool woman any more.”
“I don’t agree with you on the way you’ve got Joan sized up, no difference if your wife did run off with a horse-doctor. Her hair ain’t red, anyway.”
“Might as well be. You ain’t so much of a hand at readin’ people, anyhow, John; before you marry you ought to see a fortune-teller and have your hand read. You got away off on Reid, holdin’ up for him agin’ my judgment when he first come here on the range––don’t you remember?”