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Oh, 'pals' is all right but five thousand dollars to have played it right into his hands God DAMN the luck!" The next two months were delightful. Trina and McTeague saw each other regularly, three times a week. The dentist went over to B Street Sunday and Wednesday afternoons as usual; but on Fridays it was Trina who came to the city.
Suddenly Trina paused in her work, looking expectantly toward the door. McTeague came in. "Why, Mac," exclaimed Trina. "It's only three o'clock. What are you home so early for? Have they discharged you?" "They've fired me," said McTeague, sitting down on the bed. "Fired you! What for?" "I don' know. Said the times were getting hard an' they had to let me go."
To reason with it was beyond him. He could only oppose to it an instinctive stubborn resistance, blind, inert. McTeague went on with his work. As he was rapping in the little blocks and cylinders with the mallet, Trina slowly came back to herself with a long sigh. She still felt a little confused, and lay quiet in the chair.
At times, a brusque access of passion would seize upon her, and, with a nervous little sigh, she would clasp his thick red neck in both her small arms and whisper in his ear: "Do you love me, Mac, dear? Love me BIG, BIG? Sure, do you love me as much as you did when we were married?" Puzzled, McTeague would answer: "Well, you know it, don't you, Trina?"
Trina came nearly every other day, and passed two, and even three, hours in the chair. By degrees McTeague's first awkwardness and suspicion vanished entirely. The two became good friends. McTeague even arrived at that point where he could work and talk to her at the same time a thing that had never before been possible for him.
Only once since the wedding had he called upon Trina, at a time when he knew McTeague would be out. Trina had shown him through the rooms and had told him, innocently enough, how gay was their life there. Marcus had come away fairly sick with envy; his rancor against the dentist and against himself, for that matter knew no bounds.
The canary made up for his silence, trilling and chittering continually, splashing about in its morning bath, keeping up an incessant noise and movement that would have been maddening to any one but McTeague, who seemed to have no nerves at all. After he had finished his fillings, he made a hook broach from a bit of piano wire to replace an old one that he had lost.
We'll see if we can knock over a couple of antelope to-morrow, and then we'll scoot." "I ain't got a gun," said the dentist; "not even a revolver. "Wait a second," said Cribbens, pausing in his scramble down the side of one of the smaller gulches. "Here's some slate here; I ain't seen no slate around here yet. Let's see where it goes to." McTeague followed him along the side of the gulch.
McTeague's brain was in a whirl; speech failed him. He was busy thinking of the great thing that had happened that night, and was trying to realize what its effect would be upon his life his life and Trina's. As soon as they had found themselves in the street, Marcus had relapsed at once to a sullen silence, which McTeague was too abstracted to notice.
Cribbens rode his cayuse, McTeague following in his rear on the mule. "Say," remarked Cribbens, "why in thunder don't you leave that fool canary behind at the hotel? It's going to be in your way all the time, an' it will sure die. Better break its neck an' chuck it." "No, no," insisted the dentist. "I've had it too long. I'll take it with me."
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