“You watch out for Dorales,” he said. “I know him. He’s bad med’cine.”
“So everyone says,” returned Shea, gravely serious. “I hadn’t found it so.”
Ross seemed to discern humour in this, and chuckled. “Think ye’ll stay here, Shea? Glad to have ye.”
“Unless something turns up—yes. I—well, I haven’t found that purpose we spoke about once. I’m trying hard. I’m trying to find it, to make it come, to figure out what I must do. Yet I seem all helpless, bewildered——”
“I never heard of any one puttin’ a rush label on Providence, not with any success to mention,” said Ross, dryly. “You’re lookin’ so hard for something that you can’t find it. You’re too damn serious. About sixty, ain’t ye? Well, at sixty you’re goin’ through what ye should ha’ gone through at thirty or less. Limber up your joints an’ take it easier, pardner. Wait for what turns up, an’ remember God ain’t dealing from a cold deck.”
Here was wisdom, and Thady Shea tried to accept it.
Upon the following afternoon Thady Shea was laboriously plowing the upper flat. Down at the shack, Fred Ross was cleaning house. He was cleaning house in his own simple and thorough fashion. He took everything outside in the sun. Then he set to work with a bucket of suds and a broom, and scrubbed the walls, floor, and ceiling; he was figuring on papering the walls a little later. The result of this cleaning was damp but satisfactory.
Having returned most of his belongings to their proper places, Ross was engaged in fitting together the iron bed. He heard the grinding roar of a car coming up the cañon trail in low gear, and went to the doorway. A dust-white flivver was approaching. As he watched, it came up to the shed and halted. There was but one person in the car.
From the dust-white flivver alighted a tall, large woman clad in old but neat khaki, upon her head a black bonnet. With surprise, Ross recognized her; it was the woman whom he had seen at Datil the previous day. It was the woman who had bought Dad Griffith a meal, and who, presumably, had given the ancient a lift toward the Arizona line.
She approached the doorway and transfixed Ross with keen, glittering blue eyes. Her look was one of unmistakable truculence, of hostility.