“That’s easy,” she said, and now she was peering up at him through a tousled short forelock. “You’re going to set us up on a place out here somewhere—a ranch. We’re going to raise beef. He knows about beef. And I’m going to learn. I aim to be the leading lady beefer of the Imperial Northwest before I’m done.”
“Whose notion was that?” His voice had sharpened the least bit.
“Mine, of course. He doesn’t know anything about it. His idea is that we start in on what he can earn. But my idea is that we start in on a few of the simoleons that have already been earned—by you. And that’s the idea that’s going to prevail.”
“Lucky I brought a fountain pen and a check-book along,” he said. “Nothing like being prepared for these sudden emergencies. Still, I take it there’s no great rush. Now, I tell you what: You run along and locate your mother and get that over with. She knows how I stand—we’ve been discussing this little affair our own selves.”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, you have?” She seemed disappointed somehow—disappointed and slightly puzzled.
“Oh yes, several times. And on your way kindly whisper to the young man that I’m lurking right here behind these rocks ready to have a few words with him—if he can spare the time.”
“Righto!” She reached up and kissed him and went swinging away, suspecting nothing, and for just a moment Mr. Gatling’s conscience smote him, that she did not suspect.
“I’ve got to do it,” he said to himself, excusing himself. “I’ve just got to find out—for her sake and ours—yes, and for his, too. It looks like an impossible bet and I’ve got to make sure.”
With young Tripler he had more than the few words he had specified. They had quite an interview and as they had it the youth’s embarrassment, which at the outset of the dialogue had made him wriggle and mumble and kick with his toes at inoffensive pebbles, gradually wore off until it vanished altogether and his native assurance reasserted itself. A proposition was advanced. It needed little pressing; promptly he fell in with it. It appealed to him.
“So we’re agreed there,” concluded his prospective father-in-law, clinching the final rivets. “We’ll all go right ahead and finish out this tour—it’s only a couple of days more anyhow and there’s still a few cutthroats I want to catch. Then I’ll take Shirley and her mother and run on out to Spokane. We’ll hustle one of the other boys back tomorrow to the entrance to tell my chauffeur to load some bags in the car and run around to this side and meet us where we come out. We’ll leave you there and you can dust back to the starting point through that short cut over the Garden Wall you were just speaking of. The business that I’ve got in Spokane will keep me maybe two or three days. That’ll give you time to get those new clothes of yours and then we’ll all meet over at Many Glacier—I’ll wire you in advance—and in a day or two we’ll all go on East together so’s you can get acquainted with Shirley’s friends and so forth. But of course, as I said before, that’s our secret—all that part of it is. You’ve never been East, I believe?”