“Cousin Egbert’s man,” repeated Mrs. Effie, a little ostentatiously, I thought. “Poor Egbert’s so dependent on him—quite helpless without him.”
Cousin Egbert muttered sullenly to himself as he assisted me with the bags. Then he straightened himself to address them.
“Won him in a game of freeze-out,” he remarked quite viciously.
“Does he doll Sour-dough up like that all the time?” demanded the Mixer, “or has he just come from a masquerade? What’s he represent, anyway?” And these words when I had taken especial pains and resorted to all manner of threats to turn him smartly out in the walking-suit of a pioneer!
“Maw!” cried our hostess, “do try to forget that dreadful nickname of Egbert’s.”
“I sure will if he keeps his disguise on,” she rumbled back. “The old horned toad is most as funny as Jackson.”
Really, I mean to say, they talked most amazingly. I was but too glad when they moved on and we could follow with the bags.
“Calls her ‘Maw’ all right now,” hissed Cousin Egbert in my ear, “but when that begoshed husband of hers is around the house she calls her ‘Mater.’”
His tone was vastly bitter. He continued to mutter sullenly to himself—a way he had—until we had disposed of the luggage and I was laying out his afternoon and evening wear in one of the small detached houses to which we had been assigned. Nor did he sink his grievance on the arrival of the Mixer a few moments later. He now addressed her as “Ma” and asked if she had “the makings,” which puzzled me until she drew from the pocket of her skirt a small cloth sack of tobacco and some bits of brown paper, from which they both fashioned cigarettes.
“The smart set of Red Gap is holding its first annual meeting for the election of officers back there,” she began after she had emitted twin jets of smoke from the widely separated corners of her set mouth.