Sheep Limit/Chapter 10
At the sight of Peck's extremity drawing into the sanctuary of the door, Tippie strained his breath through his teeth, making a sound similar to that produced by certain gross feeders when eating juicy fruit. It was meant to express Tippie's stunned condition of amazement, which purpose it answered very well.
"That's him!" Tippie said.
"I'd know that foot if I saw it stickin' out of a mud-hole," Rawlins agreed, immediately forced to close up his face and hold it buckled tight to keep in the laughter that was beating against his teeth.
"He didn't need no horse, he can outrun any horse on the range," Tippie declared, but not as a man giving credit where credit was due.
"He's a wind-splitter, all right," Rawlins said. "He can run like an Arkansaw hog. What's next?"
"I'll show him if I can git him out of that house!"
"Mrs. Duke's likely to give him his walkin' papers, don't you think?"
"No, somehow I don't. She wants that girl married off, she's itchin' to git her off of her hands."
"It oughtn't be much trouble, with all that money," said Rawlins. They were riding slowly toward the house.
"What money?" Tippie asked, facing around in his challenging, surly way.
"That million or so you mentioned to Peck. Of course, I understand you stretched it a good deal."
"I wasn't 'praisin' property when I said she was worth a million and more; I was talkin' about the girl. If I was a young man I'd take her ahead of any money. A good woman's worth more to a man than a million of money, any day. Edith ain't got no money—nothing to speak of."
"Is that a fact?"
Rawlins was interested. If that could be poured into Peck's ear it very likely would start him on his way to St. Joe quicker than any amount of plotting against his valor and dignity.
"Her folks died when she was a little tad, left her a few thousand, but nothing to speak of in this country where money's so common it's a bother to pack it around. I remember the day she come here. Duke was alive then. She was a little spindle-shanked, towheaded kid that looked like she'd been raised on soup. I learnt her to ride a horse. And look at her now! They don't grow any purtier, and they don't grow any better."
"I believe you," Rawlins said, with the sincerity of one who had needed no argument to convince him.
"So you can see how it is. If I git a chance to boost anybody she likes I go the limit, and if I have to hit somebody she don't like, I'll hit him double hard."
"Plain enough," said Rawlins.
"Tippie measured the sun and said it was dinner-time when they had put the horses away and thrown them a forkful of hay. After dinner, he said, they would drive out to the range. The men would be needing grub. If they ran low on it they would butcher sheep, and the old lady didn't like that.
Edith met them on the kitchen porch, appreciative of what they had tried to do for her, but downcast because of the failure. She couldn't get a laugh out of it at all. The disappointment overclouded the humor of Peck's dramatic return to the kitchen door.
"He came back like he belonged here," she said.
"Where's he at?" Tippie inquired.
"In there," Edith replied, nodding hopelessly toward the door.
"Tell him there's a man out here wants to see him on business—wants to give him an order for knee pants," Tippie requested. He peeled off his leather coat, took off his hat, pushed up the sleeves of his jersey as if he prepared to wash.
"It wouldn't work, Elmer," she said glumly. "He's strung out on the sofa with a wet towel on his head. Aunt Lila's takin' care of him like a sick sheep."
Elmer said no more. He plunged into the basin, washing himself viciously. Edith returned to the kitchen, where she had set out their dinner on the end of the long table. Mrs. Duke joined them after the meal had begun.
"I never saw a man shook up like that long-hungry feller was when he come slammin' in here a little while ago," she said. "It was quite a while before I could git head or tail of what had happened to him."
"Um-m-m," said Elmer, busy over his plate.
"It was a fool thing for you to do," she said, mildly corrective, shaking her head over the broken-down plot gravely. "That feller might 'a' shot him. I don't want to be mixed up in no murder. It's bad enough to nearly lose a horse."
"Nowhere near it," Tippie denied.
"It ain't hardly right to steer a green stranger into a dangerous piece of business like that," Mrs. Duke went on with her lecture, all the time putting things on her plate, cutting, mixing, stirring, making ready. "I guess we'd be as green in his ways as he is in ours if we was to go to the city. The poor feller didn't know he wasn't welcome here; he didn't come on his own move. He was led on to it, he had a good excuse. The way you boys has played your hand I don't see what Edith can do but marry him now. You put it up to him that way, and he took the bet. After leadin' him on with them letters, too!"
"I never led him on, Aunt Lila," Edith protested, red to the ears, weakly indignant, knowing that she was in no small measure to blame. "I never expected he'd come here any more than I expected the moon to fall."
"Maybe you didn't expect him, but you led him on. It was like givin' a man your note and never expectin' him to ask you to pay it."
"Well, I'll not pay it!" Edith declared in no uncertain spirit.
"I don't see what else you can do and be honest with the man," Mrs. Duke insisted. "He's got a good business back in St. Joe, he tells me."
"It wasn't any more than a little innocent pastime as far as I was concerned," said Edith, no longer slow to defend herself publicly, seeing that she was publicly arraigned. "You ought to have sense enough to understand that, even if he hasn't."
"When I was a girl we didn't have mail-order beaux," Mrs. Duke said, superior in her uncontaminated innocence. "But I know right and wrong, and the way you're treatin' that boy's wrong."
"Boy! Aunt Lila, he's thirty-five, if he's a day."
"He's a boy in experience. He don't know what you mean when you write 'Yes' and say 'No.'"
"Did it hurt him when the horse pitched him over the fence?" Rawlins inquired, hoping to turn the current of Mrs. Duke's virtuous argument.
"His face is scratched up a little, but he didn't break anything, as far as I can tell," Mrs. Duke replied.
"No, he couldn't have made that time with anything broken," Rawlins told her. "He had farther to go than the horse, but I believe he nearly beat it."
"It ain't no laughin' matter," she reproved. "Just look at the mess we'd 'a' been in if he'd 'a' been killed."
"Trouble to find a coffin long enough without doublin' him," said Tippie, rancorously.
"Well, you let him alone," Mrs. Duke admonished. "When he finds out he ain't wanted I guess he's got sense enough to leave. I took him for a kind of a joke myself till I saw him come in that door with his eyes popped out of his head so fur I could 'a' hung my shoes on 'em. His face was a-bleedin', he was a-gaspin' and a-gappin' like a feller that was about gone. He stood leanin' his back agin the door, holdin' it shut like he was scairt somebody was tight after him, openin' his mouth without a bit more sound comin' out of him than a snake. Mr. Duke acted that way one time when he took a spoonful of camphor. It cut off his breath, slick. I thought that time he was a goner, sure as you live."
She lapsed off into silence there, eyes on her dinner, as if overcome by the recollection of Duke's agony. Rawlins glanced over at Edith. She was not taking much enjoyment out of that meal.
"Yes, you boys leave Mr. Peck to me," Mrs. Duke ordered, rather than requested. "I guess when Edith makes up her mind for good she won't have him, he'll pack up his things and go."
"It's ridiculous for you to talk that way, Aunt Lila," Edith said. "I never intended to have him, I never thought of having him. I told Mr. Rawlins how it was—Elmer understands how it was. Nobody but you and that silly fool thinks there was anything serious about it at all."
"No man's goin' to come away out here from St. Joe to see a girl without reason," Mrs. Duke argued.
"He came because he's got a better opinion of his charms than anybody else," Edith returned, hotly contemptuous of Peck's assurance. "He thinks no girl can resist him."
"He thinks you wanted him; I can see that stickin' out all over him," Mrs. Duke insisted.
"I told him yesterday, the minute I took him in the house, it was all a mistake—him coming away out here on a wild-goose chase like that. But he'll not take 'No' for an answer. He's the kind you've got to knock down and drag out."
"Now, honey, don't you worry over it," Mrs. Duke counseled her kindly. "No use in hurtin' the man's feelin's, even if he is simple. You can tell him nice and pleasant you won't have him, and I guess you'll git rid of him without sendin' him over there for them fence-riders to shoot."
"I did tell him nice and pleasant, and the darned fool tried to kiss me!"
"Any dog'll try to lick your face if you treat it too well," Tippie said.
"Well, don't you worry, honey, don't you worry. Just so you don't abuse the feller. I ain't goin' to have him abused, after orderin' him by mail that way, or courtin' him by mail, anyhow. You've got to treat him decent. I guess he's got feelin's, like any other man."
"I don't want him hangin' around," Edith complained. "He told Smith Phogenphole he'd come out here to marry me—I could see that in Smith's old dish face as plain as biscuits on a plate."
"You'd better marry him, then, and save your name," said Mrs. Duke, forgetting her counsel of calmness, throwing in a handful of worry seed already sprouted.
"You talk foolish for a woman of your age sometimes, Aunt Lila," Edith reproved her solemnly.
"I'll bet he's got his ear to that keyhole right now," Tippie said, giving the door a savage look.
"He's stretched out with a wet towel over his eyes"
"I'll stretch him out with a glass over his face!" Tippie threatened, squaring around as if to charge the door.
"You let him alone, Elmer. After dinner you and Ned load up a wagon and go out to the boys. You leave Mr. Peck to me."
Mrs. Duke worked herself up into considerable heat over Peck's wrongs, and her position as defender of his well-meaning simplicity. She was a lady who loomed large at the table, seeming to be elevated by a cushion, or a dictionary, or a Dr. Gunn, in the manner many a child of sturdy American freemen received its first contact with knowledge. This was accounted for by the uncommon length of her back, which hoisted head and shoulders to a level with any man when she was sitting.
She was wearing a red dress with white dots, the collar of it somewhat disproportionate to the generous mold of her neck, a very leaflet of a collar indeed, of one width all around, edged with a narrow white binding. It was altogether too juvenile for Mrs. Duke's figure, which, while still growing, was no longer young.
"You can throw that hospital band in with old Alvino's," she directed Tippie. "He's a good herder, that man knows more about sheep than any human I ever saw. You'd think he was related. You'll be a week or more gittin' around to the boys, I guess, won't you, Elmer?"
"Not unless I break a leg," Elmer replied ungraciously.
"Take your time. Let me know how that lawyer feller's doin'—Riley—you know the one."
"Um-m-m," Elmer grunted.
"And after this, you leave Mr. Peck to me."
There was no other way for it, in the face of such direct orders. Tippie told Rawlins she was designing to put something over on him while he was away among the herders stocking their wagons and paying them their wages.
"She can't force that girl to marry him, it's preposterous to think she can," Rawlins said.
"You don't know Lila Duke as well as I do. It wouldn't surprise me to come back and find that girl married to that pair of scissors and sent off to Missouri. It's bad enough to come from there, but it's worse to have to go back."
"Is Edith from Missouri too?"
"Kansas City. Her father was a railroad man, killed in a wreck."
"I feel like her neighbor," Rawlins said.
But he did not see any such end to the mail-order romance as Tippie feared. It was too ridiculous to have a serious possibility in his eyes. Edith was so heartily ashamed of her part in it, of Peck's boasting to the liveryman, and resentful of the fellow's familiarities, that she could not be reconciled to even a friendly footing.
However agreeable Peck may have been in a mail-order course of courtship, he was a disappointment when reared up before Edith on his big flat feet. Rawlins was not particularly concerned in the case at all. Edith was not in a situation deserving any broad sympathy, yet he had been, and still was, willing to bear a hand in prying Peck away from what he doubtless thought to be a pretty good thing.
In the course of a few days a true appreciation of his standing and chances with Edith would penetrate Peck's sharp-roofed head. It was Rawlins' belief they would return to the ranch to find his place at the table empty. So thinking, he drove away with Tippie to the range, four horses to the heavy wagon loaded with supplies for the herders' camps.