"Not me!" he says firmly. "She never done any work in her life except to boost her own social celebrity."
Then he took another gulp of his lemonade and says, very bitter:
"Madam Peach Blossom! I wonder what that funny little mite of hers will say when she sees her to-night? Something laughable, I bet—like it would be 'Madam Onion Blossom!'—or something comical, just to give her a good laugh after her hard day."
Such is Cousin Egbert, and ever will be. And Genevieve May, having took up things all round the circle, is now back to the dance.
X
AS TO HERMAN WAGNER
It had been a toilsome day for Ma Pettengill and me. Since sunup we had ridden more than a score of mountain miles on horses that could seldom exceed a crawl in pace. At dawn we had left the flatlands along the little timbered river, climbed to the lava beds of the first mesa, traversed a sad stretch of these where even the sage grew scant, and come, by way of a winding defile that was soon a mounting cañon, into big hills unending.
Here for many hours we had laboured over furtive, tortuous trails, aimless and lost, it might have seemed, but that ever and again we came upon small bands of cattle moving one way. These showed that we had a mission and knew, after all, what we were about. These cattle were knowingly bent toward the valley and home. They went with much of a businesslike air, stopping only at intervals to snatch at the sparse short grass that grows about the roots of the sagebrush. They had come a long journey from their grazing places, starting when the range went bad and water holes dried, and now seemed glad indeed to give up the wild free life of a short summer and become tended creatures again, where strangely thoughtful humans would lavish cut grass upon them for certain obscure but doubtless benevolent purposes of their own.
It was our mission this day to have a look-see, mebbe as far as Horsefly Mountain, and get a general idee of how many head was already coming down to eat up the so-and-so shortest hay crop that had ever been stacked on the Arrowhead since the dry winter of '98, when beef fell to two cents a pound, with darned few takers at that.
It was really a day of scenic delight, if one hadn't to reflect sorely upon the exigencies of the beef-cattle profession, and at least one of us was free of this thrall.