“He did. Kid had a sore throat that looked like diphtheria, an’ he sat there all night a-painting it with kerosene. Brought it ’round, too, he did.”
“Kain’t understan’ it.” Jake shook his head. “For my part, I’d sink the country under water twenty minutes if I could, an’ drown the hull brown b’iling. But let me tell you, Son, them peculiar interests of his’n ain’t going to hurt him none with Missy. If there’s anything a girl likes in a man it’s to see him make over kids. Marks him for a good daddy, I s’pose, an’ without actually reasoning it out that way it’s what they’re all a-wanting.”
“Don’t seem to have feazed her much as yet,” Sliver grumbled. “Look at him. A fine lad, straight an’ strong an’ true, eddicated an’ well raised; now where in hell ked you find a better match for Lady-girl? But though he’s been here two months, there’s nothing doing. Sometimes I ketch myself wishing he’d hand her a crack like he give me. It ’u’d make her sit up an’ take notice!”
Jake approved the diagnosis. “They’re real friendly—friendly as a brace of bugs in a rug. She likes to chin with him. When he’s telling, evenings, about New York, an’ university doings, her eyes shine like clear wax candles, but ’tain’t fer him. She’s jest a-seeing an’ a-doing an’ a-being what he’s telling. Sure she likes him an’ him her, but, as you say—there’s nothing doing.”
Bull ripped out an oath, but his feeling was so sincere, his disappointment so deep, that the profanity was like unto a consecration. “Makes me feel like knocking their damn young heads together.” As, rising, he tapped the ashes out of his pipe on his huge palm, he added: “I’ve gotter ride out to the valley pastures this afternoon, an’ while I’m that far I’ll jest go on an’ have a word with Mrs. Mills. She’s that clever I’ll bet you she’d have ’em hitched be this if she’d been here.”
“Say!” Sliver’s nod followed Bull as he walked away. “Third time this month—once beca’se he’d heard Betty was ailing; again ’cause it was rumored raiders had been seen around her rancho; now beca’se he wants advice. D’y’ know, I believe it’s the widow herself. Whoopee! kin you think of it! Old Bull an’ her an’ domestic bliss an’—”
“D’you reckon it’s anything to josh about?” Jake sternly interrupted. “I uster laugh at the very idee of living straight an’ sorter scorn them as did, but let me tell you, hombre, that after a man touches forty there ain’t a thing in the world left for him but a wife’s smile across the table an’ children’s hands clutching his knee.” His bleak eyes, lean, sarcastic face, had lit as to a vision. Now the illumination died and left it even colder. “After the pleasant time we’ve had here, that old hell an’ ruin life looks like a bad dream. I’ve thought, sometimes, I’d try to quit it. I would with jest half of Bull’s natural goodness. But I’m bad clean through to the bone. Why, I’m fixing even now, while I’m talking, for a bust. My system’s that dry I ked drink up a lake, an’ my fingers is itching to get into a game.”
“Me, too.” Sliver, always reflective, took the color of Jake’s mood. “I’ll soon be due for a night at the fonda.” He added, with comical pathos: “You bet, I’ll go an’ lie down to it again. But I do wish Felicia, out there, would put in a better brand of p’ison. I suffer so when I’m through.”
“Sure.” Jake accepted the inevitable with fatalism that almost amounted to satisfaction. “One of these days I’ll take a tumble an’ go back to the old life till it’s cut off by the sheriff’s rope. But Bull—”
Seven hours of steady riding brought Bull to the rise from which, on his first visit, he had looked back on the widow’s rancho. The low sun filled the pocket in the hills wherein the buildings stood with fluid gold that set the chrome-yellow walls off in a blaze, fired the red masses of the bougainvillea with deeper flame. It also set a glow on Bull’s face, revealing a softness, expectancy that could not be credited altogether to his mission. A few yards to his right stood an old ’dobe wall, relic of some former building, and so absorbed was he in his musing that he never noticed a rifle-barrel projecting through a crack till a voice broke the golden silence.