Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 31, 2025
"I'm willin'; but I'm not goin' around by the back door to miss that feller." They came up the porch into the light that fell weakly from the office down the steps. There was a movement of feet beside the green bench, an exclamation, a swift advance on the part of the big-nosed man who had afforded amusement for Taterleg in the barber's chair.
I wouldn't give that girl a job washin' dishes in the oyster parlor if she was to travel from here to Wyoming on her knees." So they arrived at the ranch from their last expedition together. Lambert gave Taterleg his horse to take to the barn, while he stopped in to deliver Pat Sullivan's check to Vesta and straighten up the final business, and tell her good-bye.
The story had come as the result of questions concerning the great white house on the mesa, the two men sitting on the porch in plain view of it, Taterleg entertaining the daughter of the hotel across the show case in the office. Lambert found the story more interesting than anything he ever had imagined of the Bad Lands.
His neighbors closed round where he stood explaining the affair, his stump of arm lifting and pointing in the expressionless gestures common to a man thus maimed. "Are you hurt?" Lambert inquired. "No, I ain't hurt none, Duke." Taterleg got aboard of his horse with nothing more asked of him or volunteered on his part. They had not proceeded far when his indignation broke bounds.
Taterleg rode up to the fence-cutters and disarmed them, holding his gun comfortably in their ribs as he worked with swift hand. The rifle he handed down to the old negro, who was now on his feet, and who took it with a bow and a grave face across which a gleam of satisfaction flashed. The holsters with the revolvers in them he passed to the Duke, who hung them on his saddle-horn.
"Well, from what the boys told me, if he's still a-goin' like he was when they seen him last, he must be up around Medicine Hat by now." "It was a sin the way you threw a scare into that man, Taterleg." "I'm sorry I didn't lay him out on a board, dern him!" "Yes, but you might as well let him have Alta." "He can come back and take her any time he wants her, Duke."
"I wonder where she's at?" said Taterleg, leaning and peering. "I don't see her around here nowheres." "I'll go down to the bunkhouse and see if there's anybody around," Lambert said, for he had a notion, somehow, that he ought to meet her on foot.
Lambert did not see much of Vesta in those first weeks of his employment, for he lived afield, close beside the fences which he guarded as his own honor. Taterleg had a great pride in the matter also. He cruised up and down his section with a long-range rifle across his saddle, putting in more hours sometimes, he said, than there were in a day.
"It was too bad, old feller." "Wasn't it hell? I was so sore when she wrote, the way she'd believed that little sawed-off snorter with rock dust in his hair, I never answered that letter for a long time. Well, I got another letter from her about a year after that. She was still in the same place, doin' well. Her name was Nettie Morrison." "Maybe it is yet, Taterleg." "Maybe.
It needs cleanin' up, ma'am, that's what it needs." "It surely does, Mr. Wilson: you've got it sized up just right." "Well, Taterleg, I guess we'd better be hittin' the breeze," the Duke suggested, plainly uneasy between the duty of courtesy and the long lines of unguarded fence. Taterleg could not accustom himself to that extraordinary bunkhouse when they returned to it, on such short time.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking