So June took her first timid steps into the social life of the frontier town. Shyly she made friends, and with them went to church, to Sunday School, and to picnics.
It had been definitely decided that she was to wait on table at the hotel restaurant and not return with her father to Piceance Creek. The plan had originated with Mollie, but Tolliver had acquiesced in it eagerly. If June went home with him Houck might reappear on the horizon, but if she stayed at Bear Cat, buttressed by the support of the town, the man from Brown’s Park would not dare to urge his claim again.
June waited on table at the hotel, but this did not keep her from the dances that were held in the old army hospital building. There were no class distinctions in Bear Cat then. There are not many now. No paupers lived in the county. This still holds good. Except the owners of the big cattle companies there were no men of wealth. A man was not judged by what he had or by the kind of work he was doing. His neighbors looked through externals to see what he was, stripped of all adventitious circumstance. On that basis solely he was taken into fellowship or cast out from it.
The girl from Piceance Creek worked hard and was content, even if not quite happy. If she ever thought of the boy she had married, no reference to him ever crossed her lips. She was known simply as June by the town. Strangers called her Miss Tolliver.
There was about her a quiet self-possession that discouraged familiarity on the part of ambitious and amorous cowboys. Her history, with its thread of tragedy running through the warp and woof of it, set her apart from other girls of her age. Still almost a child in years, she had been caught in the cross-currents of life and beaten by its cold waves. Part of the heritage of youth—its gay and adventurous longing for experience—had been filched from her before she was old enough to know its value. In time she would perhaps recover her self-esteem, but she would never know in its fullness that divine right of American maidenhood to rule its environment and make demands of it.
CHAPTER XXII
AN ALTERNATIVE PROPOSED AND DECLINED
The prediction made by Blister Haines that some overbearing puncher would bully Bob because of his reputation as safe game did not long wait fulfillment. A new rider joined the Slash Lazy D outfit. He had been working for the K Bar T for a couple of months. Prior to that time he had not been seen on the river. The rumor was that he hailed from Wyoming. To ask for more specific information would not have been good form. More than one or two cowboys in the Rio Blanco country had left their former homes just ahead of a sheriff.