“Shucks! And she's to find him caged, and waiting for stripes and a shaved head? How d' yu' know she mightn't hate that worse 'n if he'd been just shot like a man in a husband scrape, instead of jailed like a skunk for thieving? No, sir, she mustn't. Think of how it'll be. Quick as the stage pulls up front o' the Buffalo post-office, plump she'll be down ahead of the mail-sacks, inquiring after her brother, and all that crowd around staring. Why, we can't let her do that; she can't do that. If you don't feel so interfering, I'm good for this job myself.” And Mr. McLean took the lead and marched jingling in to supper.
The seat he had coveted was vacant. On either side the girl were empty chairs, two or three; for with that clean, shy respect of the frontier that divines and evades a good woman, the dusty company had sat itself at a distance, and Mr. McLean's best seat was open to him. Yet he had veered away to the other side of the table, and his usually roving eye attempted no gallantry. He ate sedately, and it was not until after long weeks and many happenings that Miss Buckner told Lin she had known he was looking at her through the whole of this meal. The straw-hatted proprietor came and went, bearing beefsteak hammered flat to make it tender. The girl seemed the one happy person among us; for supper was going forward with the invariable alkali etiquette, all faces brooding and feeding amid a disheartening silence as of guilt or bereavement that springs from I have never been quite sure what—perhaps reversion to the native animal absorbed in his meat, perhaps a little from every guest's uneasiness lest he drink his coffee wrong or stumble in the accepted uses of the fork. Indeed, a diffident, uncleansed youth nearest Miss Buckner presently wiped his mouth upon the cloth; and Mr. McLean, knowing better than that, eyed him for this conduct in the presence of a lady. The lively strength of the butter must, I think, have reached all in the room; at any rate, the table-cloth lad, troubled by Mr. McLean's eye, now relieved the general silence by observing, chattily:
“Say, friends, that butter ain't in no trance.”
“If it's too rich for you,” croaked the enraged proprietor, “use axle-dope.”
The company continued gravely feeding, while I struggled to preserve the decorum of sadness, and Miss Buckner's face was also unsteady. But sternness mantled in the countenance of Mr. McLean, until the harmless boy, embarrassed to pieces, offered the untasted smelling-dish to Lin, to me, helped himself, and finally thrust the plate at the girl, saying, in his Texas idiom,
“Have butter.”
He spoke in the shell voice of adolescence, and on “butter” cracked an octave up into the treble. Miss Buckner was speechless, and could only shake her head at the plate.
Mr. McLean, however, thought she was offended. “She wouldn't choose for none,” he said to the youth, with appalling calm. “Thank yu' most to death.”
“I guess,” fluted poor Texas, in a dove falsetto, “it would go slicker rubbed outside than swallered.”
At this Miss Buckner broke from the table and fled out of the house.