The girl rose. “Yes.”
“Well, howdy!” She extended her hand, and Lee took it. “My name’s Jackson—Mrs. Orlando Jackson. I knew yore pa and you before ‘the war.’”
Lee Virginia dimly recalled such a family, and asked: “Where do you live?”
“We hole up down here on a ranch about twenty miles—stayed with yore ma last night—thought I’d jest nacherly look in and say howdy. Are ye back fer to stay?”
“No, I don’t think so. Will you sit down?”
Mrs. Jackson took a seat. “Come back to see how yore ma was, I reckon? Found her pretty porely, didn’t ye?” She lowered her voice. “I think she’s got cancer of the stummick—now that’s my guess.”
Virginia started. “What makes you think so?”
“Well, I knew a woman who went just that way. Had that same flabby, funny look—and that same distress after eatin’, I told her this mornin’ she’d better go up to Sulphur and see that new doctor. You see, yore ma has always been a reckless kind of a critter—more like a man than a woman, God knows—an’ how she ever got a girl like you I don’t fairly understand. I reckon you must be what the breedin’ men call ‘a throw-back,’ for yore pa wa‘n’t much to brag of, ‘ceptin’ for looks—he certainly was good-lookin’. He used to sober down when he got where you was; but my—good God!—weren’t they a pair to draw to? I’ve heard ’Lando tell tales of yore ma’s doin’s that would ’fright ye. Not that she fooled with men,” she hastened to say. “Lord, no! For her the sun rose and set in Ed Wetherford. She’d leave you any day, and go on the round-up with him. It nigh about broke her up in business when Ed hit the far-away trail.”
The girl perceived that in her visitor she had one of these self-oiled human talking-machines “with tongue hung in the middle,” as the old saying goes, and she was dimly conscious of having heard her many times before. “You don’t look very well yourself,” she said.
“Me? Oh, I’m like one o’ these Injun dawgs—can’t kill me. I’ve been on the range so long I’m tough as dried beef. It’s a fierce old place for a woman—or it was before ‘the war’—since then it’s kind o’ softened down a hair.”