Loudon, quite untouched by this scene of shiftlessness, hooked out a chair with his foot, dropped his hat on the floor, and sat down.
"Oh, Mis' Lainey!" he called.
A female voice, somewhat softened by distance and a closed door, instantly began to make oration to the effect that if any lazy chunker of a puncher thought he was to eat any food he was very much mistaken.
The door banged open. A slatternly, scrawny woman appeared in the doorway. She was still talking. But the clacking tongue changed its tone abruptly.
"Oh, it's you, Tom Loudon!" exclaimed the lean woman. "How are yuh, anyway? I'm shore glad to see yuh. I thought yuh was one o' them rousy fellers, an' I wouldn't rustle no more chuck this noon for the likes o' them, not if they was starvin' an' their tongues was hangin' out a foot. But yo're different, an' I ain't never forgot the time you rode thirty mile for a doc when my young one was due to cash. No, you bet I ain't! Now don't you say nothin'. You jest set right patient a short spell an' I'll rustle——"
The door swung shut, and the remainder of the sentence was lost in a muffled din of pans. Loudon winked at the closed door and grinned.
He had known the waspish Mrs. Lainey and her paunchy husband since that day when, newly come to the Lazy River country, he had met them, their buckboard wrecked by a runaway and their one child apparently dying of internal injuries. Though Loudon always minimized what he had done, Mrs. Lainey and her husband did not. And they were not folk whose memories are short.
In less than twenty minutes Mrs. Lainey brought in a steak, fried potatoes, and coffee. The steak was fairly tough, so were the potatoes, and the coffee required a copious quantity of condensed milk to render it drinkable. But Loudon ate with a rider's appetite. Mrs. Lainey, arms folded in her apron, leaned against the doorjamb, and regaled him with the news of Farewell.
"Injun Joe got drunk las' week an' tried to hogtie Riley's bear. It wasn't hardly worth while buryin' Joe, but they done it. Mis' Stonestreet has a new baby. This one makes the twelfth. Yep, day before yestiddy. Charley's so proud over it he ain't been sober since. Slep' in the waterin'-trough las' night, so he did, an' this mornin' he was drunk as ever. But he never did do things by halves, that Charley Stonestreet. Ain't the heat awful? Yep, it's worse'n that. Did yuh hear about——"
Poor, good-hearted Mrs. Lainey. With her, speech was a disease. Loudon ate as hurriedly as he could, and fled to the sidewalk. Bill Lainey, who had fallen asleep again, roused sufficiently to accept six bits.