Me Smith

thought of Dutch Joe. I worked him over for singin’ a love-song, and I wisht I hadn’t. He’d held up a stage, and was cached in my camp till things simmered down. It was lonesome, and I’d want to talk; but he’d sit back in the dark, away from the camp-fire, and sing to himself about ’ridin’ to Annie.’ How the miles wasn’t long or the trail rough if only he was ’ridin’ to Annie.’ Sittin’ back there in the brush, he sounded like a sick coyote a-hollerin’. It hadn’t no tune, and I thought it was the damnedest fool song I ever heard. After he’d sung it more’n five hundred times, I hit him on the head with a six-shooter, and we mixed. He quit singin’, but he held that gretch against me as long as he lived.
    “I thought it was because he was Dutch, but it wasn’t. ’Twas love. Why, girl, I’d ride as long as my horse could stand up under me, and then I’d hoof it, just to hear you say, ‘Smith, do you think it will rain?’”
    “Oh, I never thought of this!” cried Dora, as Smith paused.
    Her face was full of distress, and her hands lay tightly clenched in her lap.
    “Do you mean I haven’t any show—no show at all?” The color fading from Smith’s face left it a peculiar yellow.
    “It never occurred to me that you would misunderstand, or think anything but that I wanted to help you. I thought that you wanted to learn so that you would have a better chance in life.”
    “Did you—honest? Are you as innocent as that, girl?” he asked in savage scepticism. “Did you believe that I’d set and study them damned verbs just so I’d have a better chanct in life?”
    “You said so.”
    “Oh, yes, maybe I said so.”
    “Surely, surely , you don’t think I would intentionally mislead you?”
    “When a woman wants a man to dress or act or talk different, she generally cares some.”
    “And I do ‘care some’!” Dora cried impulsively. “I believe that you are not making the best of yourself, of your life; that you are better than your surroundings; and because I do believe in you, I want to help you. Don’t you understand?”
    Her explanation was not convincing to Smith.
    “Is it because I don’t talk grammar, and you think you’d have to live in a log-house and hang out your own wash?”
    Dora considered.
    “Even if I cared for you, those things would have weight,” she answered truthfully. “I am content out here now, and like it because it is novel and I know it is temporary; but if I were asked to live here always, as you suggest, in a log-house and hang out my own wash, I should have to care a great deal.”
    “It’s because I haven’t a stake, then,” he said bitterly.
    “No, not because you haven’t a stake. I merely say that extreme poverty would be an objection.”
    “But if I should get the dinero —me, Smith—plenty of it? Tell me,” he demanded fiercely—“it’s the time to talk now—is there any one else? It’s me for the devil straight if you throw me! You’d better take this gun here, plant it on my heart, and pull the trigger. Because if I live—I’m talkin’ straight—what I have done will be just a kid’s play to what I’ll do, if I ever cut loose for fair. Don’t throw me, girl! Give me a show—if there ain’t any one else! If there is, I’m quittin’ the flat to-day.”
    Dora was silent, panic-stricken with the responsibility which he seemed to have thrust upon her, almost terrified by the thought that he was leaving his future in her hands—a malleable object, to be shaped according to her will for good or evil.
    A certain self-contained, spectacled youth, whose weekly letters arrived with regularity, rose before her mental vision, and as quickly vanished, leaving in his stead a man of a different type, a man at once unyielding and gentle, both shy and bold; a man who seemed to typify in himself the faults and virtues of the raw but vigorous West. Though she hesitated, she replied:
    “No, there is no one.”
    And Ralston, fording the stream, lifted his eyes midway and saw Smith raise Dora’s hand to his lips.
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    XI
THE BEST HORSE
    There was a subtle change in Ralston, which Dora was quick to feel. He was deferential, as always, and as eager to please; but he no longer sought her company, and she missed the quick exchange of sympathetic glances at the table. It seemed to her, also, that the grimness in his face was accentuated of late. She found herself crying one night, and called it homesickness, yet the