“You’re not supposed to think. You’re not equipped for thinking. Women have a constitutional brain impediment that absolutely prevents them coherently or rationally——”
“Dad, look here. Don’t you know that it’s November 20th? The cattle are still on the range and everybody in the country is talking about us. They think we’ve gone plumb crazy. And why? Just because he wants to go on and on beating you and——”
“What’s this? What’s this? A discourse of depreciation of a prized employee of O Bar O?”
“Father!” Hilda seldom called her father “Father,” but she believed herself to be in a desperate situation and desperate speech and measures were necessary. “Father, you have simply got to beat him to-night. You——”
“You leave the room, miss.”
“Dad, I——”
“Leave the room!” roared P. D.
“Oh, if you only knew how unhappy I am,” cried Hilda piteously. Her father took her by the shoulders and turned her bodily out, closing the door sharply between them, and returning to pace the floor of his own office, and work off some of the upsetting influences which might not be well for that calmness and poise of mind necessary for a game of chess.
The ranch house was a great, unwieldy building, with a wide hall dividing on one side the enormous living-room and on the other the dining-room, beyond which was P. D.’s office and study.
Hilda shot out of her father’s office into the darkened dining-room, and from there into the lighted hall, where she collided with the entering Cheerio. On him, she turned the last vials of her wrath.