“Well,” he said musingly, and then his mind took one of those particular turns that made me love him, “Taylor ought to see her. She'd be just the schoolmarm for Bear Creek!”
“She's not much like the eating-house lady at Medicine Bow,” I said.
He gave a hilarious chuckle. “No, Em'ly knows nothing o' them joys. So yu' have no notion about her? Well, I've got one. I reckon maybe she was hatched after a big thunderstorm.”
“In a big thunderstorm!” I exclaimed.
“Yes. Don't yu' know about them, and what they'll do to aiggs? A big case o' lightnin' and thunder will addle aiggs and keep 'em from hatchin'. And I expect one came along, and all the other aiggs of Em'ly's set didn't hatch out, but got plumb addled, and she happened not to get addled that far, and so she just managed to make it through. But she cert'nly ain't got a strong haid.”
“I fear she has not,” said I.
“Mighty hon'ble intentions,” he observed. “If she can't make out to lay anything, she wants to hatch somethin', and be a mother anyways.”
“I wonder what relation the law considers that a hen is to the chicken she hatched but did not lay?” I inquired.
The Virginian made no reply to this frivolous suggestion. He was gazing over the wide landscape gravely and with apparent inattention. He invariably saw game before I did, and was off his horse and crouched among the sage while I was still getting my left foot clear of the stirrup. I succeeded in killing an antelope, and we rode home with the head and hind quarters.
“No,” said he. “It's sure the thunder, and not the lonesomeness. How do yu' like the lonesomeness yourself?”