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The lady was tightly wedged between Saterlee and the side of the buggy. Every now and then Saterlee made a tremendous effort to make himself narrower, but it was no use. "If you begin to get numb," he said, "tell me, and I'll get out and walk a spell.... How clear the air is! Seems as if you could stretch out your hand and touch the mountains.
The proprietor removed the cheese-cloth fly protector from the two-by-three mirror over the bar, slipped a white jacket over his blue shirt, and rubbed his hands together invitingly, as if washing them. "What's your pleasure, gents?" said he. As the lady approached the bar she stumbled. Saterlee caught her by the elbow. "That rail down there," he said, "ain't to trip over.
But," and she spoke a little bitterly, "several times in my life my actions and my motives have been open to misconstruction, and they have been misconstrued. I have suffered, sir, much." "Well, Ma'am," said Saterlee, "my reputation as a married man and a father of many children is mixed up in this, too. If we are in late or out late rather and there's any talk I guess I can quiet some of it.
There wa'n't no bed for a man in his own house. But I found this here old copy of the Medical Revoo, 'n' I'm puttin' in the time with erysipelis." "But," said Saterlee, "you must find some place for this lady to rest. She is worn out with walking and hunger." "Stop!" whined the old man, smiting his thigh, "if there ain't that there mattress in the loft!
"Ain't you two married?" he said. "Nop," said Saterlee shortly. "Now ain't that ridiculous?" meditated the old man; "I thought you was all along." His eyes brightened behind the spectacles. "It ain't for me to interfere in course," he said, "but hereabouts I'm a Justice of the Peace." Neither spoke. "I could rouse up the boys in the kitchen for witnesses," he insinuated.
Shorn of her hat and her elaborate hair-dressing, the lady was no longer showy, and Saterlee, out of the tail of an admiring eye, began to see real beauties about her that had hitherto eluded him. Whatever other good qualities and virtues she may have tossed overboard during a stormy and unhappy life, she had still her nerve with her. So Saterlee told himself.
"Ma'am," said Saterlee, the most chivalrous courtesy in his voice, for hers had sounded truly distressed, "fire away!" "It's about my daughter," she said. "She has made up her mind to marry a young man whom I scarcely know. But about him and his antecedents I know this: that his father has buried three wives." The blood rushed into Saterlee's face and nearly strangled him.
He himself was not toying with beefsteak, boiled eggs, mashed potatoes, cauliflower, lima, and string beans. He was eating them. Each time he looked at the lady he muttered something to his heart of a dove: "Flighty. Too slight. Stuck on herself. Pin-head," etc. With his food Saterlee was not patient. He dispensed with mastication. Neither was he patient of other people's matrimonial ventures.
A clergyman at one of the rear tables quietly remarked, "Washout," and Saterlee, who had not forgotten the days when he had learned to fall from a bucking bronco, relaxed his great muscles and swore roundly, sonorously, and at great length. The car came to rest at the bottom of the embankment, less on its side than on its top. For a moment or so it seemed all was perfectly quiet.
And she must she shall listen to me." "If I can help in any way," said Saterlee, somewhat grimly, "you can count on me.... Not," he said a little later, "that I'm in entire sympathy with your views, Ma'am.... Now, if you'd said this man Saterlee had divorced three wives...." The lady started. And in her turn suffered from a torrential rush of blood to the face.
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