“I’m so glad he’s making good with Justin. I just knew he was a splendid fellow.”
“I’m so dawg-goned hot-headed. Can’t wait an’ give myself time to cool off,” he grumbled.
“He told Justin about it. The doctors gave him a lot of morphine or something when he was wounded and he got in the habit of using it to relieve the pain. Before he knew it he couldn’t stop.”
“You’d think I’d learn a lick or two of sense, an’ me ’most fifty.”
“He hasn’t touched the stuff since he went up to the dam. Justin says it must have been horrible for him. Some nights he kept walking till morning.”
“What else was it I called him besides a slacker—after I’d beat him up till he couldn’t stand, an’ him a sick man at that?”
Betty laughed at the way each of them, absorbed in a personal point of view, was carrying on a one-sided conversation.
“Are you going up to Elk Creek to-day, Dad? If you are, I wish you’d let me go along.”
“I was thinkin’ about it. Like to go, would you? All right. We might drive and take Ruthie.”
“That’d be fine. Let’s go.”