United States or Saint Vincent and the Grenadines ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Freed from his wife’s masterful presence, Leander dared to be an "agnostic," as he called himself, of an unprecedentedly violent order. His iconoclasm was not of a pattern with paw’s gusty protests against life in general, but it was Leander’s way of asserting himself, on the rare occasions when he got a chance, to deny clamorously every tenet advanced by every religion.
"Stealin’ cattle ain’t good for the health hereabouts," said Leander, as one who spoke with authority. "It’s apt to bring on throat trouble." But Mary did not find Leander’s joke amusing. She had suddenly remembered the pale, gaunt man who had walked into the eating-house the previous morning and walked out again, his errand turned into farce-comedy by the cowardice of an unworthy antagonist.
This harrowing ballad was repeated with accompanying Delsarte at intervals during the afternoon, but as Mary and the fat lady managed to escape without accident, they began to feel that they bore charmed lives. At sundown they came to the road-ranch of Johnnie Dax, bearing Leander’s compliments as a secret despatch.
She glanced towards this childlike person and saw from his stealthy manner that he had more to impart. He walked towards the kitchen door, saw no one, and came back to Mary. "There ain’t a man in this Gawd-forsaken country wouldn’t lope at the chance to die for her—but the women!" Leander’s pantomimic indication of absolute feminine antagonism was conclusive.
It was bitterly cold, and Mary reflected that if Leander’s teeth chattered half as hard as hers did, without breaking, they must, indeed, be of excellent quality. The storm began to abate, and the sky became lighter, though the water still poured in torrents. As soon as her responsibility as driver left her time to speak, Mrs. Yellett lost no time in fastening the cloud-burst to Leander.
"Yes," answered Mrs. Yellett, reflectively, "Leander’s mouth do run about eight and a half octaves. Sometimes I don’t blame his wife for bangin’ down the lid." They talked of Jim Rodney’s troubles, and the growing hatred between sheep and cattle men, because of range rights. "Now that pore Jim had a heap of good citizen in him, before that pestiferous cattle outfit druv’ his sheep over the cliff.
"Nasty Injun ways!" scoffed Leander’s masterful lady, consciously superior from the intrenchment of her stuffy bedroom, that boasted crochet-work on the backs of the chairs and a scant lace curtain at its solitary window. Judith, going to her favorite pool to bathe, saw that it had shrunk till it seemed but a fairy well hid among the willows.
"Jest tell her for me, will you, that I want to hire her husband to do some herdin’; Leander’s handy, ’n’ can work good an’ sharp, if he is an infidel. An’ I like to have him over now an’ then, as you know, Judy. Leander ’d stop in the middle of shearin’ a sheep to argue that Jonah never came out o’ the whale’s belly.
Jonah and the whale constituted one bait by means of which Leander could be lured from food, sleep, or work of the most pressing nature. "The poor fool would stop in the middle of shearing a sheep to argue that Jonah never come out of the whale’s belly," the matriarch had told Mary Carmichael, in summing up Leander’s disadvantages as a herder.
Dax regarded them with the mercilessness of a death-watch; she remembered the time when Hamilton’s excuses for his frequent presence at the post-office had been more voluble than logical. But now he no longer came, and Judith, for all her deliberate flow of spirits, did not quite convince the watchful eyes of Leander’s lady—the postmistress was a trifle too cheerful. "Mrs.
Word Of The Day