Echo buried her face in her hands. Dry sobs shook her bosom. Awe-stricken, Polly gazed at the over-wrought wife.
"PFEW!" she laughed, to shake off her fright. "That was a sure enough nightmare. If I'd a dream like that I'd wake up the whole house yapping like a coyote."
As the commonplace ever intrudes upon the unusual, so a knock on the door relieved the tension of the situation. It was Slim. He did not wait for an invitation to enter, but, opening the door, asked: "Can I come in?"
"Sure, come in," cried Polly, glad to find any excuse to shake off the depression of Echo's dream.
"Howdy, Mrs. Payson, just come over to see Jack," was the jolly Sheriff's greeting.
"He's down at the corral," she informed him.
Mrs. Allen hurried in from the kitchen at this moment, calling: "Echo, come here, and look at this yere cake. It looks as if it had been sot upon."
Echo closed the lid of the piano and called her mother's attention to the presence of Slim Hoover.
"How d'ye do, Slim Hoover?—you might have left some of that dust outside."
The Sheriff was greatly embarrassed by her chiding. In his ride from Florence to the Sweetwater, the alkali and sand stirred up by the hoofs of the horses had settled on his hat and waistcoat so freely that his clothing had assumed a neutral, gray tone above which his sun-tanned face and red hair loomed like the moon in a fog. Josephine's scolding drove him to brush his shoulders with his hat, raising a cloud of dust about his head.