So now she listened over again to the hours of stage jolting that “we” had before us, and that lay between her and Nate. “We would be four—herself, Lin, myself, and the boy Billy.” Was Billy the one at supper? Oh no; just Billy Lusk, of Laramie. “He's a kid I'm taking up the country,” Lin explained. “Ain't you most tuckered out?”
“Oh, me!” she confessed, with a laugh and a sigh.
There again! She had put aside my solicitude lightly, but was willing Lin should know her fatigue. Yet, fatigue and all, she would not sleep in the agent's room. At sight of it and the close quarters she drew back into the outer office, so prompted by that inner, unsuspected strictness she had shown me before.
“Come out!” she cried, laughing. “Indeed, I thank you. But I can't have you sleep on this hard floor out here. No politeness, now! Thank you ever so much. I'm used to roughing it pretty near as well as if I was—a cowboy!” And she glanced at Lin. “They're calling forty-seven,” she added to the agent.
“That's me,” he said, coming out to the telegraph instrument. “So you're one of us?”
“I didn't know forty-seven meant Separ,” said I. “How in the world do you know that?”
“I didn't. I heard forty-seven, forty-seven, forty-seven, start and go right along, so I guessed they wanted him, and he couldn't hear them from his room.”
“Can yu' do astronomy and Spanish too?” inquired the proud and smiling McLean.
“Why, it's nothing! I've been day operator back home. Why is a deputy coming through on a special engine?”
“Please don't say it out loud!” quavered the agent, as the machine clicked its news.