"Oh, no—only a short trip, I reckon. Got to get back before my money gives out."
He did not intend to enter the revolver contest, but it offered so easy to his hand that he went in and won hands down. His arm was lame, but his nerves, not fevered by whisky, swiftly recovered tone. He was careful, however, not to go beyond the limits of the contest as he should have done had his arm possessed all of its proper cunning. He had no real competitor but Dan, who had been drinking steadily all day and was unfitted for his work. Mose lost nothing in the trial.
That night he put into his pocket one hundred and twenty dollars as the result of his day's work, and immediately asked to be released of his duties as guard.
The manager of the Express Company said: "I'm sorry you're leaving us, and I hope you'll return to us soon. I'll hold the place open for you, if you say so."
This Mose refused. "I don't like it," he said. "I don't think I earn the money. Hire a good driver and he'll have no trouble. You don't need me."
Mindful of his promise to eat dinner with the princess, he said to Reynolds: "Don't wait for me. Go on—I'll overtake you at Twelve Mile Creek."
The princess had not lost sight of him for a single moment, and the instant he departed from his friends she drove up. "You are to come to my house to-night, remember."
"I must overtake my folks; I can't stay long," he said lamely.
Her power was augmented by her home. He had expected pictures and fine carpets and a piano and they were there, but there was a great deal more. He perceived a richness of effect which he could not have formulated better than to say, "It was all fine." He had expected things to be costly and gay of color, but this mysterious fitness of everything was a marvel to one like himself, used only to the meager ornaments of the homes in Rock River, or the threadbare poverty of the ranches and the squalid hotels of the cow country. The house was a large new frame building, not so much different from other houses with respect to exterior, but as he entered the door he took off his hat to it as he used to do as a lad in the home of Banker Brooks, deacon in his father's church.
His was a sensitive soul, eye and ear were both acute. He perceived, without accounting for it, that the walls and hangings were complementary in color, that the furniture matched the carpet, and that the pictures on the wall were unusually good. They were not all highly-colored, naked subjects, as he had been led to expect. His respect for Mrs. Raimon rose, for he remembered that Mary's home, while just as different from this as Mary was different from Mrs. Raimon, had, after all, something in common—both were beautiful to him, though Mary's home was sweeter, daintier, and homelier. He was in the midst of an analysis of these subtleties when Mrs. Raimon (as he now determined to call her) returned from changing her dress.