Movement down at the barn distracted her watch on the distant trail. It was the hired man bearing a bucket of fresh milk, steaming in the wintry air. He was a tall, lean creature of an age he would have been reluctant to admit. He wore a chin-whisker that was almost as white as the snow that overlaid the world. And he came up to the house at a gait the vigor of which suggested a youth he could never hope to see again.
“She’s runnin’ slack,” he said, in a tone that jarred harshly on the still air. “But I ’low she’s a swell beast, and she’s made a good winter feed for herself. There’s a good haf-gallon of juice that’ll be solid cream by morning.”
“Jessie’s surely a good cow, Lightning,” Molly smiled. Then her smile broadened into a laugh. “Say, it’s queer how our feelings bubble over when we get the thing we want. Jessie hands us gallons more milk in the year than any of the others. So she’s a swell beast, and we pat her, and make a fuss of her, and give her an extra dope of feed. If she gave us less, why, she’d just be any ordinary old thing, from a fool cow to something worse. It’s the way of things, eh? When folks hand us all we ask we purr over them like a bunch of cats when you stroke them right.”
The lean face of Lightning Rogers distorted itself into a grin. He loved to hear his young mistress “say things.” Often enough he failed to get the meaning underlying her laughing comments, but his twisted smile was a never-failing response.
Lightning was a derelict of a strenuous past. He had, like many another of his kind, passed through a disreputable life, to settle down to an old age that was completely occupied with the attempt to supply his old body with sufficient fuel to keep burning the smouldering fires of such life as remained to him. Maybe the hot spirit of early days had lost something of its volcanic nature, but there were still flashes of it to be discovered by those who knew him well enough. He still prided himself on his skill with his ancient guns, which, in his early cattle days, had earned him the sobriquet of “Two-gun” Rogers. He still delighted in the thought that he could take his liquor like a man, and not want to shoot up more than one town at a time when the red light of Rye whisky flooded his bemused brain. He still found satisfaction in a flow of anathema that had never yet failed him. For all his sixty years, he was still a creature of extraordinary vigor of mind and body. And nothing on earth could dissuade him from working from sun-up to sun-down, whether in the height of summer or the depth of winter.
Molly had known him as her father’s hired man nearly as long as she could remember. And even now there still remained something of the fascination for his tattered chin-whisker, which, in her early childhood, had made her love to claw it with both hands whenever she could find a position of reasonable security on a lap that somehow never seemed to have been built for the accommodation of any human body.
Lightning went off into a guffaw of laughter.
“Cats! That’s what we are,” he cried. “Full of claw’s an’ meanness if you don’t stroke us right. That’s how it was, Molly gal, when I shot the glass of Rye right out of the hand of Jim Cluer when he said my paw must ha’ bin a Dago ’cos I guessed to the whole saloon I’d a big hunch for a feed of spaghetti. It sure is a mean thing to rob a boy of his liquor. I——”
“That’s enough of your bad old past, Lightning,” Molly cried, with another laugh. “I can stand for your talk of other days till you get inside the saloons. You see,” she added slily, “the saloons are still only twenty-odd miles away, and I haven’t heard that twenty-odd miles worries you a thing with a Rye highball at the other end of it. Are you through with the chores?”
The man’s grin passed, and a look of uncertainty clouded his snapping eyes. He was afraid lest the girl was really offended.