"That's my husband," said the woman. "Want to see him?"
"N-n-no, ma'am," Cassidy stammered hastily.
The woman nodded appreciatively. "Few does," she said, "and I guess it wouldn't do yuh much good. What's the matter with yuh? Yuh don't seem right well."
"No, ma'am," Cassidy confessed; "I ain't very well to-day."
The woman smiled a little. There was a pause. "How long have yuh been drinkin'?" she asked in a gentle voice.
"'Bout five days now," said Cassidy, reddening to the tips of his ears and bashfully looking up for the first time.
She was a short, well-made woman, dressed in black from the hem of her shiny skirt to the long plush bonnet-strings dangling loosely in her lap. Her face was a firm, pleasant oval, quite unlined except near the eyes, where there was a multitude of fine wrinkles such as come from squinting across a desert under a desert sun. There was nothing particularly worth noting about her face, except that it had an exceptionally healthy appearance. But her eyes fascinated Cassidy. They were an uncompromising, snapping black. They seemed brimming over with vitality. They were eyes that showed a strength of will behind them only woefully expressible in her woman's voice. They had a compelling quality in their straightforward honesty that forced Cassidy at once to forego the rest of her features. If he ventured to admire the firm white chin and well-kept teeth, the eyes flashed a stern rebuke. If his gaze slipped down to the sleazy, badly fashioned dress, the eyes brought him up with a round turn, slapped him, and reduced him to obedience. If his own flitted curiously to the smooth brown hair, drawn simply, plainly away from her forehead, hers towed him mercilessly back.
"We never drank much down tuh the ranch," she remarked, with the easy deviance of one who understands another's failings and does not wish to pain him by intruding their own immunity; "and now I s'pose there won't be hardly any. I'm Sarah Gentry. Yuh know me? We live down tuh Willow Springs."
Cassidy nodded. He knew Willow Springs and its well-kept ranch. It was the only fertile neck of land that ran down to Ochre Desert, an oasis, a veritable paradise of cottonwoods, willows, dark fields of alfalfa, a capably fenced corral, long lines of beehives, and apple-and olive-trees.
Cassidy grinned feebly. "I know. I stoled a mushmelon there last week."