Me Smith

Schoolmarm, Ralston had laughed at her with his eyes. It was a great thing—a really sacred thing to Susie—this secret that she had offered him. The telling of it to McArthur had been so delightful an experience that she yearned to repeat it, but now she meant never to tell any one else. Any way, McArthur was her “pardner,” and it was enough that he should know. So it came about that afterwards, when Ralston sought her company and endeavored to learn something of the workings of her mind, he found the same barrier of childish reserve which had balked Dora, and no amount of tact or patience seemed able to break it down.
    The young deputy sheriff’s interest in Dora increased in leaps and bounds. He experienced an odd but delightful agitation when he saw the sleepy white pony plodding down the hill, and the sensation became one easily defined each time that he observed Smith’s horse ambling in the road beside hers. The feeling which inspired Tubbs’s disgruntled comment, “Smith rides herd on the Schoolmarm like a cow outfit in a bad wolf country,” found an echo in Ralston’s own breast. Truly, Smith guarded the Schoolmarm with the vigilance of a sheep-dog.
    He saw a possible rival in every new-comer, but most of all he feared Ralston; for Smith was not too blinded by prejudice to appreciate the fact that Ralston was handsome in a strong, man’s way, younger than himself, and possessed of the advantages of education which enabled him to talk with Dora upon subjects that left him, Smith, dumb. Such times were wormwood and gall to Smith; yet in his heart he never doubted but that he would have Dora and her love in the end. Smith’s faith in himself and his ability to get what he really desired was sublime. The chasm between himself and Dora—the difference of birth and education—meant nothing to him. It is doubtful if he recognized it. He would have considered himself a king’s equal; indeed, it would have gone hard with royalty, had royalty by any chance ordered Smith to saddle his horse. He judged by the standards of the plains: namely, gameness, skill, resourcefulness; to him, there were no other standards. After all, Dora Marshall was only a woman—the superior of other women, to be sure, but a woman; and if he wanted her—why not?
    He would have been amazed, enraged through wounded vanity, if it had been possible for him to see himself from Dora’s point of view: a subject for reformation; a test for many trite theories; an erring human to be reclaimed by a woman’s benign influence. Naturally, these thoughts had not suggested themselves to Smith.
    Ralston looked forward eagerly to the evening meal, since it was almost the only time at which he could exchange a word with Dora. Breakfast was a hurried affair, while both she and Susie were absent from the midday dinner. The shy, fluttering glances which he occasionally surprised from her, the look of mutual appreciation which sometimes passed between them at a quaint bit of philosophy or naïve remark, started his pulses dancing and set the whole world singing a wordless song of joy.
    Somehow, eating seemed a vulgar function in the Schoolmarm’s presence, and he wished with all his heart that the abominable grammar lessons which filled her evenings might some time end; in which case he would be able to converse with her when not engaged in rushing bread and meat to and fro.
    His most carefully laid plans to obtain a few minutes alone with her were invariably thwarted by Smith. And from the heights to which he had been transported by some more than passing friendly glance at the table, he was dragged each evening to the depths by the sight of Dora and Smith with their heads together over that accursed grammar.
    He commenced to feel a distaste for his bunk-house associates, and took to wandering out of doors, pausing most frequently in his meanderings just outside the circle of light thrown through the window by the dining-room lamp. Dora’s guilelessness in believing that Smith’s interest in his lessons was due to a desire for knowledge did not make the tableau less tantalizing to Ralston, but it would have been against every tenet in his code to suggest to Dora that Smith was not the misguided diamond-in-the-rough which she believed him.
    Smith, on the contrary, had no such scruples. He lost no opportunity to sneer at Ralston. When he discovered Dora wearing one of the first flowers of spring, which Ralston had brought her, Smith said