“You said it then!” With a grim firmness Mr. Gatling interrupted. “You’re so much older than she is; that’s your trouble. And I’m suffering from the same incurable complaint. People our age who’ve got children growing up go around bleating that young people are different from the way young people were when we were young. They’re not. They’re just the same as we were—same impulses, same emotions, same damphoolishness, same everything—but they’ve got a new way of expressing ’em. And then we say we can’t understand them. Knock thirty years off of our lives and we’d understand all right because then we’d be just the same as they are. So you’ll not say a word to that youngster of ours—not yet awhile, you won’t. Nor me, neither.” Grammar, considered as such, never had meant very much to Mr. Gatling, that masterful, self-educated man.
“But if I pointed out a few things to her—if I warned her—”
“Ma’am, you’ll perhaps remember your own daddy wasn’t so terribly happy over the prospect when I started sparking you. After I’d come courting and had gone on home again I guess it was as much as the old man could do to keep from taking a shovel and shoveling my tracks out of the front yard. But he had sense enough to keep his mouth shut where you were concerned. Suppose he’d tried to influence you against me, tried to break off the match—what would have happened? You’d have thought you were oppressed and persecuted and you’d have grabbed for me even quicker than you did.”
“Why, Hector Gatling, I never grabbed—”
“I’m merely using a figure of speech. But no, he had too much gumption to undertake the stern-father racket. He locked his jaw and took it out in nasty looks and let nature take its course, and the consequence was we got married in the First Methodist Church with bridesmaids and old shoes and kins folks and all the other painful details instead of me sneaking you out of a back window some dark night and us running off together in a side-bar buggy. No, ma’am, if you’ll take a tip from an old retired yardmaster of the Lackawanna, forty-seven years, man and boy, with one road, you’ll—”
“You never worked a day as a railroad man and you know it.”
“Just another figure of speech, my dear. Understand now, you’re to keep mum for a while and I keep mum and we just sit back in our reserved seats up in the grandstand and see how the game comes out. A nice polite quiet game of watchful waiting—that’s our line and we’re both going to follow it. We’ll stand by for future developments and then maybe I’ll frame up a little campaign. With your valuable advice and assistance, of course!”
With a manner which she strove to make casual and unconcerned, the disturbed Mrs. Gatling that day watched. It was the manner rather of a solicitous hen with one lone chick, and she continually oppressed by dreads of some lurking chicken-hawk. It would have deceived no one who closely studied the lady’s bearing and demeanor. But then, none in the party closely studied these.
The camp dunnage being miraculously bestowed upon the patient backs of various pack-animals, their expedition moved. They overtook and passed Dad Wheelis and his crew, caravaning with provender for the highway contractors on up under the cloud-combing parapet of the Garden Wail Wall, and behind them heard for a while his frank and aboveboard reflections upon the immediate ancestries, the present deplorable traits, the darkened future prospects of his work stock. They swung away from the rutted wagon track and took the steeper horseback trail and for hours threaded it like so many plodding ants against the slant of a tilted bowl. They stopped at midday on a little plateau fixed so high toward heaven that it was a picture-molding on Creation’s wall above a vast mural of painted buttes and playful cataracts and a straggling timber-line and two jeweled glaciers.