McWilliams ordered a team of young horse hitched, and presently set out on his two day journey to Gimlet Butte. He reached that town in good season, left the team at a corral and walked back to the Elk House. The white dust of the plains was heavy on him, from the bandanna that loosely embraced the brown throat above the flannel shirt to the encrusted boots but through it the good humor of his tanned face smiled fraternally on a young woman he passes at the entrance to the hotel. Her gay smile met his cordially, and she was still in his mind while he ran his eye down the register in search of the name he wanted. There it was—Miss Nora Darling, Detroit, Michigan—in the neatest of little round letters, under date of the previous day’s arrivals.
“Is Miss Darling in?” asked McWilliams of the half-grown son of the landlady who served in lieu of clerk and porter.
“Nope! Went out a little while ago. Said to tell anybody to wait that asked for her.”
Mac nodded, relieved to find that duty had postponed itself long enough for him to pursue the friendly smile that had not been wasted on him a few seconds before. He strolled out to the porch and decided at once that he needed a cigar more than anything else on earth. He was helped to a realization of his need by seeing the owner of the smile disappear in an adjoining drug store.
She was beginning on a nut sundae when the puncher drifted in. She continued to devote even her eyes to its consumption, while the foreman opened a casual conversation with the drug clerk and lit his cigar.
“How are things coming in Gimlet Butte?” he asked, by way of prolonging his stay rather than out of desire for information.
Yes, she certainly had the longest, softest lashes he had ever seen, and the ripest of cherry lips, behind the smiling depths of which sparkled two rows of tiny pearls. He wished she would look at him and smile again. There wasn’t any use trying to melt a sundae with it, anyhow.
“Sure, it’s a good year on the range and the price of cows jumping,” he heard his sub-conscious self make answer to the patronizing inquiries of him of the “boiled” shirt.
“Funny how pretty hair of that color was especially when there was so much of it. You might call it a sort of coppery gold where the little curls escaped in tendrils and ran wild. A fellow—”
“Yes, I reckon most of the boys will drop around to the Fourth of July celebration. Got to cut loose once in a while, y’u know.”