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Miss Satterly hastily drew her mouth into a thin, untempting, red streak, for she had not seen Weary Davidson, on an average, twice a week for the last four months for nothing. He was not the man to bluff. "Of course," she said resentfully, "you can make fun of it but all the same, it's better than nothing. It answers the purpose."
"We're going to be, so it's all the same," Weary surprised himself by declaring with much emphasis. "You'd go, wouldn't you, if I was well, say your brother?" Miss Satterly rested her chin in her palms and regarded him measuringly. "I don't know. I never had one except three or four that I er adopted, at one time or another. I suppose one could go, though with a brother."
I thought I was the only unpatriotic person in the country." "I just came from town," Weary told her, choosing, his words carefully while yet striving to be truthful. No man likes confessing to a woman that he has been run away with. I didn't want to bother anybody, but Glory seemed to think this was where the trail ended." Miss Satterly laughed again.
It's worth waiting for only yuh want to hang tight to something when I start. Come on I'll let you be the mourner." Since Miss Satterly had been taking steps quite regularly while Weary was speaking, she was now several rods away and she had, more than ever, the appearance of not hearing him and of not wanting to hear. "Say, Tee-e-cher!"
Glory, placid as a sheep, was nibbling a frayed end of the rope which held the gate shut, and Weary, the big box balanced in front of him across the saddle, was smoking a cigarette. "Well," greeted Miss Satterly breathlessly, and rather tartly, "only for you having my dress, I'd have gone straight back home. Do brothers always act like this?" "Search me," said Weary, shaking his head.
Then he swung off up the path, softly whistling "In the good, old summer-time." An old hen, hovering her chicks in the shade of the hay-rack, eyed him distrustfully and cried "k-r-r-r-r" in a shocked tone that sent her chickens burrowing deeper under her feathers. Miss Satterly had changed her pink kimono for a white shirt-waist and had fluffed her hair into a smooth coil on the top of her head.
His mind being wholly absorbed in the argument, he was not susceptible to telepathic messages from the Meeker school-house which was a pity. Also, it was a pity he could not know that Miss Satterly lingered late at the school-house that night, doing nothing but watch the trail where it lay, brown and distinct and utterly deserted, on the top of the bill a quarter of a mile away.
The next morning Miss Satterly went very early to the school-house for what purpose she did not say. A meadow-lark on the doorstep greeted her with his short, sweet ripple of sound and then flew to a nearby sage bush and watched her curiously. She looked about her half expectant, half disappointed.
Miss Satterly had just finished listlessly hearing the last spelling class recite, when she glanced through the window and saw Glory, bearing a familiar figure, race down the hill and whip into the school-house path. Her heart gave a flop, so that she caught at the desk to steady her and she felt the color go out of her face.
When the shadow of the schoolhouse stretched somberly away to the very edge of the coulee. Miss Satterly gathered up the studied confusion on her desk, bundled the papers inside, and turned the key with a snap, jabbed three hatpins viciously through her hat and her hair and went home and perhaps it were well that Weary was not there at that time.
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