Me Smith

everybody up till all to once it takes a sniff, turns around, and follers some feller off? That’s an Injun woman.”
    “I never had no luck with squaws, and the likes o’ that,” Tubbs confessed. “They’re turrible hands to git off together and poke fun at you.”
    As McArthur and the Indian woman came in from the kitchen, he was saying earnestly to her:
    “I feel sure that here, madam, I should entirely recover my health. Besides, this locality seems to me such a fertile field for research that if you could possibly accommodate my man and me with board, you may not be conferring a favor only upon me, but indirectly, perhaps, upon the world of science. I have with me my own bath-tub and pneumatic mattress.”
    Tubbs, seeing the Indian woman’s puzzled expression, explained:
    “He means we’ll sleep ourselves if you will eat us.”
    The woman nodded.
    “Oh, you can stay. I no care.”
    Smith frowned; but McArthur, much pleased by her assent, told Tubbs to saddle a horse at once, that he might lose no time in beginning his investigations.
    “If it were my good fortune to unearth a cranium of the Homo primogenus, I should be the happiest man in the world,” declared McArthur, clasping his fingers in ecstasy at the thought of such unparalleled bliss.
    “What did I tell you?” said Smith, accompanying Tubbs to the corral. “He’s tryin’ to win himself a home.”
    “Looks that way,” Tubbs agreed. “These here bug-hunters is deep.”
    The saddle blanket which Tubbs pulled from their wagon and threw upon the ground, with McArthur’s saddle, caught Smith’s eye instantly, because of the similarity in color and markings to that which he had folded so carefully inside his own. This was newer, it had no disfiguring holes, or black stain in the corner.
    “What’s the use of takin’ chances?” he asked himself as he looked it over.
    While Tubbs was catching the horse in the corral, Smith deftly exchanged blankets, and Tubbs, to whom most saddle blankets looked alike, did not detect the difference.
    Upon returning to the house, Smith found the Indian woman wiping breakfast dishes for the cook. She came into the living-room when he beckoned to her, with the towel in her hand. Taking it from her, he wadded it up and threw it back into the kitchen.
    “Don’t you know any better not to spoil a cook like that, woman?” he asked, smiling down upon her. “You never want to touch a dish for a cook. Row with ’em, work ’em over, keep ’em down—but don’t humor ’em. You can’t treat a cook like a real man. Ev’ry reg’lar cook has a screw loose or he wouldn’t be a cook. Cookin’ ain’t no man’s job. I never had no use for reg’lar cooks—me, Smith.
    “All you women need ribbing up once in awhile,” he added, as, laying his hand lightly on her arm, he let it slide its length until it touched her fingers. He gave them a gentle pressure and resumed his seat against the wall.
    The woman’s eyes glowed as she looked at him. His authoritative attitude appealed to her whose ancestors had dressed game, tanned hides, and dragged wood for their masters for countless generations. The growing passion in her eyes did not escape Smith.
    In the long silence which followed he looked at her steadily; finally he said:
    “Well, I guess I’ll saddle up. You look ‘just so’ to me, woman—but I got to go.”
    She laid down the rags of her mat and “threw him the sign” for which he had waited. It said:
    “My heart is high; it is good toward you. Talk to me—talk straight.”
    He shook his head sadly.
    “No, no, Singing Bird; I am headed for the Mexican border—many, many sleeps from here.”
    She arose and walked to his side.
    He felt a sudden and violent dislike for her flabby, swaying hips, her heavy step, as she moved toward him. He knew that the game was won, and won so easily it was a school-boy’s play.
    “Why you go?” she demanded, and the disappointment in her eyes was so intense as to resemble fear. “What you do dere?”
    He looked at her through half-closed eyes.
    “Did you ever hear of wet horses?”
    She shook her head.
    “I deals in wet horses—me, Smith.”
    The woman stared at him uncomprehendingly.
    “Down there on the border,” he explained, “you buy the horses on the Mexico side. You buy ’em when the Mexican boss is asleep in his ’dobe, so there’s no kick about the price. You swim ’em across the Rio Grande and sell ’em to the Americano waitin’ on the