That don't chill Maria at all. She acted like she was used to it. "No," says she; "but I'm tired of talking to lawyers. I couldn't tell them about Bertie, and how lonesome I've been without him these last two years. Can't I have him, Fletcher?"
About then I begins to get a glimmer of what it was all about, and by the time she'd gone on for four or five minutes I had the whole story. Maria was the ex-Mrs. Fletcher Dawes. Little Bertie was a grandson; and grandma wanted Bertie to come and live with her in the big Long Island place that Fletcher had handed her when he swapped her off for one of the sextet, and settled up after the decree was granted.
Hearin' that brought the whole thing back, for the papers printed pages about the Daweses; rakin' up everything, from the time Fletcher run a grocery store and lodgin' house out to Butte, and Maria helped him sell flour and canned goods, besides makin' beds, and jugglin' pans, and takin' in washin' on the side; to the day Fletcher euchred a prospector out of the mine that gave him his start.
"You were satisfied with the terms of the settlement, when it was made," says Mr. Dawes.
"I know," says she; "but I didn't think how badly I should miss Bertie. That is an awful big house over there, and I am getting to be an old woman now, Fletcher."
"Yes, you are," says he, his mouth corners liftin' a little. "But Bertie's in school, where he ought to be and where he is going to stay. Anything more?"
I looks at Maria. Her upper lip was wabblin' some, but that's all. "No, Fletcher," says she. "I shall go now."
She was just about startin', when there's music on the other side of the draperies. It sounds like Corson was havin' his troubles with another female. Only this one had a voice like a brass cornet, and she was usin' it too.
"Why can't I go in there?" says she. "I'd like to know why! Eh, what's that? A woman in there?"
And in she comes. She was a pippin, all right. As she yanks back the curtain and rushes in she looks about as friendly as a spotted leopard that's been stirred up with an elephant hook; but when she sizes up the comp'ny that's present she cools off and lets go a laugh that gives us an iv'ry display worth seein'.