Wanning had several times kept her after office hours to take his private letters for him, and she had always been good-natured about it. On each occasion, when he gave her a dollar to get her dinner, she protested, laughing, and saying that she could never eat so much as that.
She seemed a happy sort of little creature, didn’t pout when she was scolded, and giggled about her own mistakes in spelling. She was plump and undersized, always dodging under the elbows of taller people and clattering about on high heels, much run over. She had bright black eyes and fuzzy black hair in which, despite Miss Doane’s reprimands, she often stuck her pencil. She was the girl who couldn’t believe that Wanning was fifty, and he had liked her ever since he overheard that conversation.
Tilting back his chair—he never assumed this position when he dictated to Miss Doane—Wanning began: “To Mr. D. E. Brown, South Forks, Wyoming.”
He shaded his eyes with his hand and talked off a long letter to this man who would be sorry that his mortal frame was breaking up. He recalled to him certain fine months they had spent together on the Wind River when they were young men, and said he sometimes wished that like D. E. Brown, he had claimed his freedom in a big country where the wheels did not grind a man as hard as they did in New York. He had spent all these years hustling about and getting ready to live the way he wanted to live, and now he had a puncture the doctors couldn’t mend. What was the use of it?
Wanning’s thoughts were fixed on the trout streams and the great silver-firs in the canyons of the Wind River Mountains, when he was disturbed by a soft, repeated sniffling. He looked out between his fingers. Little Annie, carried away by his eloquence, was fairly panting to make dots and dashes fast enough, and she was sopping her eyes with an unpresentable, end-of-the-day handkerchief.
Wanning rambled on in his dictation. Why was she crying? What did it matter to her? He was a man who said good-morning to her, who sometimes took an hour of the precious few she had left at the end of the day and then complained about her bad spelling. When the letter was finished, he handed her a new two dollar bill.
“I haven’t got any change tonight; and anyhow, I’d like you to eat a whole lot. I’m on a diet, and I want to see everybody else eat.”
Annie tucked her notebook under her arm and stood looking at the bill which she had not taken up from the table.
“I don’t like to be paid for taking letters to your friends, Mr. Wanning,” she said impulsively. “I can run personal letters off between times. It ain’t as if I needed the money,” she added carelessly.
“Get along with you! Anybody who is eighteen years old and has a sweet tooth needs money, all they can get.”