"That's something for me to worry about exclusively. I'll begin when we got something to mow." There was finished coldness in this.
"Huh!" The primitive vocable now conveyed a lively resentment, but there was the pleading of a patient sufferer in what followed. "And like at the same time, having to make the trip anyway for these here supplies and things, I could stop just a minute at Doc Martingale's and have this old tooth of mine took out, that's been achin' like a knife stuck in me fur the last fourteen—well, fur about a week now—achin' night and day—no sleep at all now fur seven, eight nights; so painful I get regular delirious, let me tell you. And, of course, all wore out the way I am, I won't be any good on the place till my agony's relieved. Why, what with me suffering so horrible, I just wouldn't hardly know my own name sometimes if you was to come up and ask me!"
The woman's tone became more than ever repellent.
"Never you mind about not knowing your own name. I got it on the pay roll, and it'll still be there to-morrow if you're helping Buck get out the rest of them fence posts like I told you. If you happen to get stuck for your name when I ain't round, and the inquiring parties won't wait, just ask the Chinaman; he never forgets anything he's learned once. Or I'll write it out on a card, so you can show it to anybody who rides up and wants to know it in a hurry!"
"Huh!"
The powers of this brief utterance had not yet been exhausted. It now conveyed despair. With bowed head the speaker dully turned and withdrew from our presence. As he went I distinctly heard him mutter:
"Huh! Four-teen! Four-teen! And seven! And twenty-eight!"
"Say, there!" his callous employer called after him. "Why don't you get Boogles to embroider that name of yours on the front of your shirt? He'd adore to do it. And you can still read, can't you, in the midst of your agonies?"
There was no response to this taunt. The suffering one faded slowly down the path to the bunk house and was lost in its blackness. A light shone out and presently came sombre chords from a guitar, followed by the voice of Sandy in gloomy song: "There's a broken heart for every light on Broadway—"
I was not a little pained to discover this unsuspected vein of cruelty in a woman I had long admired. And the woman merely became irrelevant with her apothegm about foreigners. I ignored it.