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Updated: May 24, 2025
"Oh, spright 'nough," answered the section-boss. "But it's cold, it's cold. Keeps me tremblin' like a guilty nigger." "You'll get over that," assured the other, rubbing the blood into his hands. "It's natural for you to be soft as chalk-rock the first winter you've been living South." "Ah reckon," agreed Lancaster. He sat down beside the younger man, eyeing him closely.
The rest is just ridin'. Yer kin leave them hosses with the section-boss at Daggett till I come fer 'em." Never in the after years could Winston clearly recall the incidents of that night's ride across the sand waste. The haze which shrouded his brain would never wholly lift. Except for a few detached details the surroundings of that journey remained vague, clouded, indistinct.
While Dallas caught the mules, gave them some grain and a rubbing-down with straw wisps, and greased the wagon wheels. All being made ready, the section-boss took leave of his daughters, urging them to keep within the next day when the surveyors came up, and to deny his going. Then, with Ben and Betty at a smart trot, he set off for Bismarck and the land-office.
Her eyes, wide with recollection, were fixed upon Lounsbury. "But you passed through cities coming north," argued the storekeeper. "N-n-no," said Dallas, slowly; "we we skirted 'em." "What a pity!" He turned to the section-boss. "Pity!" echoed the latter. "Huh! You save you' pity. My gals is better off ef they don' meet no town hoodlums."
"Ah reckon y' could cross th' river." And so David Bond and the white horse went the way of Lounsbury. Nearly an hour passed before the section-boss addressed Dallas. "Wal? wal? wal?" She was wrapping up to do the morning chores. "Just as well, I guess, dad," she said wearily. "The meal and bacon's pretty low. I've been cooking out of the seed-sacks lately."
Then, after pillowing Marylyn's head on a Navajo blanket beside the swashing water cask, she climbed forward to the driver's seat and took the reins from her father. It was April, and when the mesa was left far to rearward, a world almost forgotten by the crippled section-boss burst in new, green loveliness upon his desert children.
A bright fire and a singing coffee-pail welcomed the three as the door swung wide, and the section-boss, who was urging Marylyn to "rustle some grub," turned with a testy word. But he fell silent when he saw Lounsbury, and edged into the dusky shelter of the hearth-side. The storekeeper nodded to him, shook hands absently with the younger girl, and took a bench.
That silence was neither demanded by the section-boss nor agreed upon by the three. On Lancaster's part, it grew out of the sneaking consciousness of the ingratitude he did not regret; on the part of Marylyn, it arose from two causes: a sense of girlish shame at having confessed her attachment, and a fear that her father would discover it.
Since his early boyhood, the section-boss had not known snow. Before the previous day, Dallas and Marylyn had never seen it. It was with exclamations of delight, therefore, that, crowding together in the doorway, the three first caught sight of the glistening drifts. "Pa, it's like a Christmas card," cried the younger girl. And, bareheaded, she ran out to frolic before the shack.
The burly man advanced upon the lean-to. "Mornin', mornin'," was his greeting. He made several swinging bows at Lancaster, and took him in shrewdly from eyes that were round and close-set. The section-boss grunted. "Lovely day," observed the other, with a bland smile. He changed his tack a little, as if he were going by. Lancaster hobbled along with him. "Y-a-a-s," he drawled. "Right good.
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