Object, Matrimony
BY CAROLINE LOCKHART
WITH a turn of his red wrist, Porcupine Jim guided his horse in and out among the badger holes which made riding dangerous business on the Blackfoot Reservation. Perplexity and discontent rested upon Porcupine’s not too lofty brow. Though he looked at the badger holes and avoided them mechanically, he saw them not.
“Would you tank, would you tank,” he burst out finally in a voice which rasped with irritation, “dat a girl like Belle Dashiel would rudder have dat pigeon-toed, smart-Aleck breed dan me?”
Porcupine’s pinto cayuse threw back one ear and listened attentively to the naïve conceit of his rider’s soliloquy.
“Look at me!” demanded Porcupine, changing the reins to his left hand that he might make a more emphatic gesture with his right. “A honest Swede, able to make fifteen dollars a day at my trade. Me as has sheared sheep from Montany to the Argentine Republic, gittin’ bounced for dat lazy half-breed dat can’t hold a yob two mont’!”
Porcupine’s thoughts upon any subject were not varied, and he burst forth at intervals with a reiteration of the same idea until he came to the ridge where he could look down upon the house of Dashiel, the squaw-man, who kept a sort of post office in a soapbox.
Porcupine had come twenty-five miles for his mail. Not that he expected any, but to be gibed at by Belle Dashiel had the same fascination for him that biting on a sore tooth has for a small boy. Gradually the knowledge had come to his slow-working mind that the half-breed girl’s interest in him rose solely from the fact that John Laney was his partner in the assessment work which they were doing in the mountains on a tenderfoot’s copper claim.