In this mood he strolled up the street after leaving me, and almost trampled Mrs. Ingersoll under foot as she dashed out of her store. She, too, had just received defeat at the hands of Holy Calm, and felt she had to save a soul alive.
Mrs. Ingersoll and Roddy were friends, after a sort. Everybody in the country was friends with him in the same fashion, as you’ve got to be with a next-to-nature man who has a reputation for originality in sin and has been in the papers no less than five times for it. So when Roddy and she collided and he said: “Why, hello, Mis’ Ingersoll! I didn’t go fer to smash ye,” and held out his big paw, she, with fine courtesy, gave him her hand and told him, smiling as though she liked to be smashed by careless cow-boys, “You’re just the one I want to see.”
Roddy was flattered. He knew, of course, that he was “just the one” any lady would want to see,—why not?—but somehow Mrs. Ingersoll was a little bit different from the rest. She did things, too, and her name was in the papers almost any time, attached to real news. Didn’t she organize the Laramie brass band that beat the Cheyenne band all to pieces?
So it really meant something to be wanted to be seen by her, and Roddy, hastily reviewing the situation, returned a handsome, “Well, you’re jest the one I wanta see. Now, ain’t that two of a kind?” and felt he had scored himself.
This paved the way for confidences. They were both smarting from too much Holy Calm. Mrs. Ingersoll blurted out her own experience, and asked Roddy how did he account for a girl like that?
Roddy pushed his hat back on his head to let out the thought that Miss Mittie seemed to lack a sense of humor and ought to be shown a thing or two; Mrs. Ingersoll, however, inclined to the belief that the trouble was “Holy Calm was too good for use,” or at least too good for any use in a millinery establishment. Roddy suggested that “something might be done fer her if ye went about it right,” but Mrs. Ingersoll averred despairingly that you’d never get an idea into Miss Mittie’s head short of cutting it open with an ax. However, after sifting the situation back and forth between them, the upshot was a soul-saving plot: Mrs. Ingersoll was to slip out just before closing time, leaving Miss Mittie to shut up shop alone; then Roddy, with a gang of cow-boys, was to “jump the store” and hold her up for a couple of hundred yards of ribbon, which they were to carry up to Mrs. Ingersoll’s house afterward.
All started off according to program. Holy Calm, softly humming to herself, was putting the store to bed as snug as anything, and thinking of her well-earned rest, when five young, seemingly desperate rascals, Roddy leading, fired their guns in the air and landed with a bounce inside, two of the boys blocking the door so she couldn’t get away.
Miss Mittie never quivered an eyelash.
“What can I do for you, gentlemen?” she asked, fixing her gaze and a smile on Roddy, whom she had met, and admired tremendously for the tales told of him.
Roddy was just a trifle dashed by her politeness, for he’d “allowed she’d screech, er something, like a woman always does,” and when anybody screeched his rule was, “Give ’em some more o’ the same medicine.” But under her serene, uncomprehending stare Roddy forgot what he’d come for.