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Said to be Tuesday.
Trip before last was the first time I seen this lady. The trail from Trevor's meets in with the track from Sky-line just at the Soda Spring. From there a sure-enough wagon road snakes down over the edge of the bench and curves away north to Brown's Ferry. At the spring you get the sound of the rapids, you catch the smell of the river like a wet knife, you looks straight down into white water, and on the opposite bench is my ranch.
Happens Jones reckoned she'd been appointed inspector of snakes, so I'd had to lay off at the spring, and Mrs. Trevor comes along to get shut of her trouble. She's hungry; she ain't had anything but her prize hawg to speak to for weeks, and she's as curious as Mother Eve, anyway. Curiosity in antelopes and women projuces venison and marriages, both species being too swift and shy to be met up with otherwise.
She's got allusions, too, seeing things as large as a sceart horse, so she's all out of focus, supposin' me to be romantic and picturesk, wharas I'm a workingman out earning dollars. Still it's kind in any lady to take an interest, and I done what you said in aiming at the truth, no matter what I hits.
Surely my meat's transparent by the way her voice struck through among my bones. If angels speak like that I'd die to hear. She told me nothin', not one word about the trouble that's killing her, but her voice made me want to cry. If you'd spoke like that when I was your puppy, you'd a had no need of that old slipper, mother.
'Cause I couldn't tear him away from the beef bones, I'd left Mick up at the Sky-line, or I'd ast that lady to accept my dog. You see, he'd bite Trevor all-right, wharas I has to diet myself, and my menu is sort of complete. Still by the time she stayed in camp, my talk may have done some comfort to that poor woman. She didn't know then that her trouble was only goin' to last another week.
This is pie day. I comes now to describing my last trip down from the Sky-line, when I hustled the ponies just in case Mrs. Trevor might be taking her cultus cooly along toward Soda Spring. Of course she wasn't there.
You'd have laughed if you'd seen Jones after she drank her fill of water out of the bubbly spring, crowded with soda bubbles. She just goes hic, tittup, hic, down the trail, changing step as the hiccups jolted her poor old ribs. The mare looked so blamed funny that at first I didn't notice the tracks along the road.
To judge by the hind shoes, Mrs. Trevor's mean colt had gone down toward the river not more'n ten minutes ago, on the dead run, then back up the road at a racking out-of-breath trot. Something must have gone wrong, and sure enough as I neared a point of rocks which hid the trail ahead, Jones suddenly shied hard in the midst of a hiccup. There was the Widow Bear's track right across the road, and Mick had to yell blue blazes to get the other ponies past the smell. Ahead of me the tracks of the Trevor colt were dancing the width of the road, bucking good and hard at the stink of bear. Then I rounded the point of rocks.