"Me? I suspected there was something about her, too; only I thought it was just that North Platte breakfast and his appetite. No meal can ever be like breakfast to them that's two-fisted, and Angus was. He'd think there was something about any girl, I says to myself, seeing her through the romantic golden haze of them North Platte breakfast victuals. Of course I didn't suggest any such base notion to Angus, knowing how little good it does to talk sense to a man when he thinks there's something about a girl. He tried to read 'Lucile' again, but couldn't seem to strike any funny parts.
"Next time he went to Omaha, a month later, he took his other suit and his new boots. 'I shall fling caution to the winds and seal my fate,' he says. 'There's something about her, and some depraved scoundrel might find it out.' 'All right, go ahead and seal,' I says. 'You can't expect us to be shipping steers every month just to give you twenty minutes with a North Platte waiter girl.' 'Will she think me impetuous?' says he. 'Better that than have her think you ain't,' I warns him. 'Men have been turned down for ten million reasons, and being impetuous is about the only one that was never numbered among them. It will be strange o'clock when that happens.' 'She's different,' says Angus. 'Of course,' I says. 'We're all different. That's what makes us so much alike.' 'You might know,' says he doubtfully.
"He proved I did, on the trip back. He marched up to Ellabelle's end of the table in his other suit and his new boots and a startling necktie he'd bought at a place near the stockyards in South Omaha, and proposed honourable marriage to her, probably after the first bite of sausage and while she was setting his coffee down. 'And you've only twenty minutes,' he says, 'so hurry and pack your grip. We'll be wed when we get off the train.' 'You're too impetuous,' says Ellabelle, looking more than ever as if there was something about her. 'There, I was afraid I'd be,' says Angus, quitting on some steak and breaking out into scarlet rash. 'What did you think I am?' demands Ellabelle. 'Did you think I would answer your beck and call or your lightest nod as if I were your slave or something? Little you know me,' she says, tossing her head indignantly. 'I apologize bitterly,' says Angus. 'The very idea is monstrous,' says she. 'Twenty minutes—and with all my packing! You will wait over till the four-thirty-two this afternoon,' she goes on, very stern and nervous, 'or all is over between us.' 'I'll wait as long as that for you,' says Angus, going to the steak again. 'Are the other meals here as good as breakfast?' 'There's one up the street,' says Ellabelle; 'a Presbyterian.' 'I would prefer a Presbyterian,' says Angus. 'Are those fried oysters I see up there?'
"That was about the way of it, I gathered later. Anyway, Angus brought her back, eating on the way a whole wicker suitcase full of lunch that she put up. And she seemed a good, capable girl, all right. She told me there was something about Angus. She'd seen that from the first. Even so, she said, she hadn't let him sweep her off her feet like he had meant to, but had forced him to give her time to do her packing and consider the grave step she was taking for better or worse, like every true, serious-minded woman ought to.
"Angus now said he couldn't afford to fritter away any more time in the cattle business, having a wife to support in the style she had been accustomed to, so he would go to work at his trade. He picked out Wallace, just over in Idaho, as a young and growing town where he could do well. He rented a nice four-room cottage there, with an icebox out on the back porch and a hammock in the front yard, and begun to paper and paint and grain and kalsomine and made good money from the start. Ellabelle was a crackajack housekeeper and had plenty of time to lie out in the hammock and read 'Lucile' of afternoons.
"By and by Angus had some money saved up, and what should he do with bits of it now and then but grubstake old Snowstorm Hickey, who'd been scratching mountainsides all his life and never found a thing and likely never would—a grouchy old hardshell with white hair and whiskers whirling about his head in such quantities that a body just naturally called him Snowstorm without thinking. It made him highly indignant, but he never would get the things cut. Well, and what does this old snow-scene-in-the-Alps do after about a year but mush along up the cañon past Mullan and find a high-grade proposition so rich it was scandalous! They didn't know how rich at first, of course, but Angus got assays and they looked so good they must be a mistake, so they sunk a shaft and drifted in a tunnel, and the assays got better, and people with money was pretty soon taking notice.
"One day Snowstorm come grouching down to Angus and tells about a capitalist that had brought two experts with him and nosed over the workings for three days. Snowstorm was awful dejected. He had hated the capitalist right off. 'He wears a gold watch chain and silk underclothes like one of these fly city dames,' says Snowstorm, who was a knowing old scoundrel, 'and he says his syndicate on the reports of these two thieving experts will pay twelve hundred for it and not a cent more. What do you think of that for nerve?'
"'Is that all?' says Angus, working away at his job in the new International Hotel at Wallace. Graining a door in the dining-room he was, with a ham rind and a stocking over one thumb nail, doing little curlicues in the brown wet paint to make it look like what the wood was at first before it was painted at all. 'Well,' he says, 'I suspected from the assays that we might get a bit more, but if he had experts with him you better let him have it for twelve hundred. After all, twelve hundred dollars is a good bit of money.'
"'Twelve hundred thousand,' says Snowstorm, still grouchy.
"'Oh,' says Angus. 'In that case don't let him have it. If the shark offers that it'll be worth more. I'll go into the mining business myself as soon as I've done this door and the wainscoting and give them their varnish.'