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All cowboys are from necessity good cooks, and the fluffy, golden brown biscuits and fragrant coffee of Red's making were unexceptionable. Despite the chill of the evening they sat around a roaring camp-fire until long after the moon rose, regaled by the quaint narratives of McVey, who was a born raconteur.
Hugh McVey lived with Henry Shepard and his wife until he became a grown man. After Sarah Shepard became his school teacher things began to go better for him.
Several times during those evenings in the presence of the two men, who talked only of making money out of the products of another man's mind, she almost forced her mind out into a concrete thought concerning women, and then it became again befogged. Clara grew tired of thinking, and listened to the talk. The name of Hugh McVey played through the persistent conversation like a refrain.
Like Hugh McVey he was tall and gaunt but unlike the inventor, whom she had seen two or three times on the street, he was not carelessly dressed. There was something sleek about him, something that suggested a well-bred dog, a hound perhaps. As he talked he leaned forward like a greyhound in pursuit of a rabbit. His hair was carefully parted and his clothes fitted him like the skin of an animal.
Evey McVey was of course among the favored few, but Mattie Allen, as usual so late in the evening, was not to be seen. She was undoubtedly "off" somewhere, probably high up on the stairs, with the most interesting man she had been able to attach.
Every one knew that Hugh McVey had suddenly given up his place in the telegraph office and that he was engaged in some enterprise with Steve Hunter. "Well, I see he has thrown off the mask, that fellow," said Alban Foster, superintendent of the Bidwell schools, in speaking of the matter to the Reverend Harvey Oxford, the minister of the Baptist Church.
He had thought that he alone was doubtful of success, but it was apparent that doubt had come also into the mind of the wheelwright. The pleading voice of the praying man, as it broke the stillness of the night, cut across and for the moment utterly destroyed his confidence. "O God, help the man Hugh McVey to remove every obstacle that stands in his way," David Chapman prayed.
The farm hand stepped away from the buggy and then came back and again put his hand on Clara's arm. The silence that lay over the barnyard lasted until the woman felt she could speak without a break in her voice. "I'm not going very far, Jim," she said, laughing nervously. "This is Mr. Hugh McVey and we're going over to the county seat to get married. We'll be back home before midnight.
He printed an article in the weekly paper in which he said that many offers had come to him to take his project to the city or to other and larger towns. "Mr. McVey, the celebrated inventor, and I both want to stick to our own people," he said, regardless of the fact that Hugh knew nothing of the article and had never been taken into the lives of the people addressed.
And the woman, clasping in her bosom a tiny satin bag containing a common yellow telegraph blank on which are written a few now undecipherable words, looks dry-eyed into the night and wonders. In the marshal's office at Gunnison, over their cigars and a big-bellied bottle, Red McVey and Ballard are looking reminiscently at a Mauser hanging on the wall.
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