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The Westfalls are all very erratic and quick-tempered. Didn't you know she was at the farm?" The young man looked exceedingly uncomfortable. "Great guns, no!" he exclaimed. "I presumed she was safe in New York. . . . And this is her lake and her water and her waves, when there are any, and no matter how I engineer it, I've got to poach some of her property.
That good lady refused flatly to absorb it, grew ludicrously plaintive and aggrieved and flew off at tearful tangents into complicated segments of family history from which it was possible to extricate only the most ridiculous of facts, chief among them the reiterated assurance that her own father had been, in the bosom of his family, of a delightfully sportive nature, but nothing like the Westfalls dear no! that he had a genteel figure, my dear, for all he had developed a somewhat corpulent tendency in later years; that the corn-beef which mother procured was highly superior to those portions of salted quadruped which Johnny obtained in the village and facts of similar irrelevancy.
Yesterday, while he was spending a little comfortable money at the Drybone hog-ranch, a casual traveller from the north gossiped of Bear Creek, and the fences up there, and the farm crops, the Westfalls, and the young schoolmarm from Vermont, for whom the Taylors had built a cabin next door to theirs. The traveller had not seen her, but Mrs.
"Mos' likely the stage-driver got it wrong, then." "Yes. Must have drownded somebody else. Here they come! That's her ridin' the horse. There's the Westfalls. Where are you running to?" "To fix up. Got any soap around hyeh?" "Yes," shouted Swinton, for the Virginian was now some distance away; "towels and everything in the dugout." And he went to welcome his first formal guests.
Cautiously raising the robe Hunch Dorrigan stared with interest at the prisoner he was inconspicuously to assist into the empty town house of the Westfalls. From a garish dream of startling unpleasantness, Philip Poynter stirred and opened his eyes. "Well, now," he mused uncomfortably, "this is more like it! This is the sort of dream to have!
There was a dare-devil lilt and sway to the flippant strains and Aunt Agatha covered her face with her hands. "Oh, Diane," she whispered, shuddering, "when he plays like that he drinks and drinks and drinks until morning." "Poor Aunt Agatha!" said the girl pityingly. "What troublesome folk we Westfalls are! And I no less than Carl." "No, no, my dear!" murmured Aunt Agatha.
Making her way to a door of which Hunch was ignorant. Aunt Agatha opened it and gasped. Fully clothed, a man whose feet and hands were securely bound, lay muttering upon the bed, his jargon incomprehensibly foreign. "God deliver us from all Westfalls!" wept Aunt Agatha. "Carl's kidnapped an immigrant!"
After all, though I was born in the Adirondacks, I am Southern, every inch of me. The Westfalls have been Florida folk since the beginning of time. "There is an interesting nomad in a picturesque suit of corduroy who crosses my path from time to time with an eccentric music-machine.
"My mother," said Carl steadily, "was a fine, big, splendid woman, unconventional like all the Westfalls, and a century ahead of her time. Moreover, she had a code of morality quite her own. If Aunt Agatha's shocked sensibilities had not eliminated her from your life so early, contact with her broad understanding of things would have tempered your sex insularity." He glanced pityingly at Diane.
Voices of women and children began to be up lifted; the Westfalls arrived in a lather, and the Thomases; and by sunrise, what with fathers and mothers and spectators and loud offspring, there was gathered such a meeting as has seldom been before among the generations of speaking men. To-day you can hear legends of it from Texas to Montana; but I am giving you the full particulars.
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