“Haven’t you seen it in his paper? Oh, I forgot that you’d been away for a couple of weeks. Well, he came out with an editorial in which he praised her but wound up with the statement that while this was a step in the right direction, she could earn the higher approval of the better class of citizens by closing the Alamo entirely and taking up some more feminine occupation, like millinery. Pearl got riled when she read it and went to see him. Nobody knows whether she had her brass knuckles in her bag or not, but she met young Ring on the street and told him that when she wanted advice, she’d call on him personally.
“‘I like it,’ says she. ‘It’s so sound and so sweet; because if there’s any town on the Big Divide where a good milliner is needed, it’s Murdock. And while I think of it,’ says she, staring at him, ‘I’m not certain you wouldn’t make a better milliner yourself than you are editor or gunman.’”
Circumlocutory Smith meditated over this for some minutes, and then said: “She’s a Cathcart. That sounds just like Cathcart used to talk.”
“Nope. She’s a Riggs. Don’t you remember what a sarcastic devil he was?”
“So was Cathcart, when drunk. I bet a hundred dollars she’s a Cathcart.”
“It’s a bet. I’ll take it. Shake! You seem to forget that Riggs was sarcastic when he was sober, and this Pearl’s always dead-cold sober.”
“She’s a Cathcart. The bet’s done made. I’ll win your hundred.”
The discussion of the antecedents of the woman known as Pearl Brown was, for these two old frontiersmen, a continuous point of difference. She had let them know that once upon a time in Tucson, in the more reckless days of Trigger Smith, she had known both Smith and Fosdike, and had asserted that in those days there had been but four decent men in the town: Father Wyatt, a priest; Henry Bean, a mail carrier; a saloon keeper named Riggs; and a blacksmith called Cathcart, to one of which she “belonged.” Inasmuch as neither the mail carrier nor the priest had ever married, and in those days she must have been very young, they reasoned that her father had been one of the latter two.
Furthermore, they were annoyed because the knowledge was one-sided, she apparently knowing all their past, while they were ignorant of hers. Also, with characteristic outspokenness she had told them not to ask her any questions.
“A shut mouth catches no flies,” she told Fosdike, “Although, come to consider it, perhaps that’s the reason you are compelled to wear that red fly trap of a beard. Must have been born with your mouth open. Wonder how your mother protected you when you were young?”