Jimsy’s gray eyes blinked and he attended to his plate. The failure of that little joke about tangled hair was the probable cause of his present silence, and the bride appealed to me.
“Ain’t that so?” she said. “You’ve been here before. You know how folks loaf around up and down this valley and stop to dinner, and stay for supper, and just eat people up!”
She was so perfectly right in principle that my only refuge from the perilous error of taking sides was the somewhat lame remark: “Well, Scipio isn’t a dead-beat, you know.”
“There!” cried Jimsy, triumphantly.
“Mr. Culloden would have fed a dead-beat just the same,” returned the lady promptly.
Again she was entirely right. From good heart and long habit Jimsy made welcome every passing traveler and his horse. When Wyoming was young and its ranches lay wide, desert miles apart, such hospitality was the natural, unwritten law; but now, in this day of increasing settlements and of rainbowed folders of railroads painting a promised land for all comers, a young ranchman could easily be kept poor by the perpetual drain on his groceries and his oats. Jimsy’s wife was stepping between him and his bachelor shiftlessness in all directions, and the propitious signs oi her influence were everywhere. Indoors and out, a crisp, new appearance of things harbingered good fortune. Why, she had actually started him on reforming his gates! Did you ever see the thing they were frequently satisfied to call a gate in Wyoming? A sordid wreck of barbed wire and rotten wood, hung across the fence-gap by a rusty loop, raggedly dangling like the ribs of a broken umbrella.
The telephone bell called Mrs. Culloden to the sitting-room near the end of dinner.
Mrs. Sedlaw, her dear friend and schoolmate living five miles up the valley, was inviting them to dinner next day to eat roast grouse.
“Let’s go,” said Jimsy.
“And you quit your ditch and me quit my ironing?” answered the clear voice. “Thank you ever so much, Susie; we’d just love to, but Jimsy can’t go off the ranch this week and I’d not like to leave him all alone, even if I wasn’t as busy as I can be with our wash.” There followed exchange of gossip and laughter over it, and much love sent to and fro—and the receiver was hung up.