"You don't tell me—well, that is news!" Henley exclaimed in surprise.
"Well, it ain't to me," Dixie laughed. "You see, Alfred, it is the same old outfit that I laid in a year ago and keep in storage. It hain't exactly the latest wrinkle as to style, but I could cut away and add a flounce here and a ruffle there, and not have so much cash to lay out as I did when I missed fire that time. But I don't think I'll get to use it soon. Field-work in the broiling sun and setting on a divan with a dinky fan to your face and a young man to peep over it don't hitch, somehow. And I'm still deep in debt to old Welborne. He's the only man I make love to, but I don't get a cent off for my smiles; he growls and grumbles every time I see him about hard times and the like. But I'll pay out one of these days. As you pass it in the morning I want you to just take a look at my stand of cotton; if the drought will let it alone I'll make five bales. Now I must go. I know you'll keep your promise, so I ain't going to worry. Good-night."
"Good-night," he echoed, and as she moved away in the darkness he took up his valise and turned his face toward the farm-house. "She's right," he muttered. "God bless her, she's plumb right."
CHAPTER XII
HE Allens had gone, taking with them the baby things, which Henley had prevailed upon them to accept. He sank into his accustomed place at home and at the store as naturally as if he had been away only for a day. The news of his return drew around him many of the motley ilk who made trading and swapping both a business and an avocation. They seldom dealt with him, to be sure, but it was a liberal education to hear his experiences, and even better to see him actually make a deal. On his first day at home he had bought a lame horse for the small sum of fifty dollars, after he had delivered a free lecture about the great "American Cruelty to Animals Association," as he called it. And, with his eyes on the owner, he gave it as his opinion that in a more enlightened community a man who would ride a horse in that condition would be dragged straight to court, and maybe imprisoned for life. When the animal was his, and the ex-owner had gone to buy a ticket to go home by rail, Henley winked at Cahews and said: "I know how to cure that hoss's leg. I paid two dollars to learn in Fort Worth from an Indian hoss-doctor. Two hundred dollars wouldn't buy 'im right now."
It was the loquacious stepfather-in-law who revelled most in Henley's sayings and doings, and he regaled his wife and Henley's with accurate and vivid reports of them. One morning he came into the sitting-room, where the two women sat bent over a quilt on a big, square frame, their needles going methodically up and down.
"You mought guess one million years," he panted, as he bent over them, that he might feast on their facial expressions, "an' not guess what Alf Henley's gone an' done."
They raised their faces and stared, and the wizened raconteur smiled as he stepped to the open fireplace, shifted the paper screen to one side, carefully spat, and then, replacing it, returned to his coign of vantage.