Lila Duke, widow of a good sheepman, was a large red lady with a double chin. Her sleek black hair was rolled into a little wisp with a protruding end at the nape of her neck; her sharp black eyes were shadowed by a hedge of heavy black eyebrows which came together end-on at the bridge of her nose. She appeared to be inflamed to the sweating point, red and moist as if she fed mainly on peppers and fat mutton stew. But she was a surprisingly nimble woman on her feet, with a hearty voice that must have carried from hill to hill like a hunting horn, and a ready laugh lying always in the curl of her tongue.
Mrs. Duke was Edith Stone's maternal aunt. She had been made a widow by the little creek that ran before the ranch-house door. Duke had attempted wading it during a spring freshet; the current had flattened him against a boulder and held him until he drowned. His picture was on the wall of the sitting-room, showing him to have been a neutral sort of force, a curve in his face as if something had been put down on him when he was very young. Not unlike a ram in expression, no collar to his large-breasted white shirt. Rawlins was thankful, looking at the portrait in air-brush and crayon, that Edith Stone had not
