Me Smith

and at the time had thought she had scented a budding romance. Had they quarrelled, she wondered?
    She sat on the edge of the bed and swung her feet.
    “My, but won’t it seem lonesome here without Mr. Ralston?” Susie sighed deeply.
    “Is he going away?” Dora asked quickly.
    “He’ll be goin’ pretty soon now, because he’s found most of his strays and bought all the ponies he wants.”
    “I suppose he will be glad to get back among his friends.”
    Susie thought Teacher looked a little pale.
    “Maybe he’ll go back and get married.”
    “Did he say so?”
    Susie was sure she was paler.
    “No,” she replied nonchalantly. “I just thought so, because anybody that’s as good-looking as he is, gets gobbled up quick. Don’t you think he is good-looking?”
    “Oh, he does very well.”
    “Gee whiz, I wish he’d ask me to marry him!” said Susie unblushingly. “You couldn’t see me for dust, the way I’d travel. But there’s no danger. Look at them there skinny arms!”
    “Susie! What grammar!”
    “Those there skinny arms.”
    “Those.”
    “Those skinny arms; those hair; those eyes—soft and gentle like a couple of augers, Meeteetse says.” Susie shook her head in mock despondency. “I’ve tried to be beautiful, too. Once I cut a piece out of a newspaper that told how you could get rosy cheeks. It gave all the different things to put in, so I sent off and got ’em. I mixed ’em like it said and rubbed it on my face. There wasn’t any mistake about my rosy cheeks, but you ought to have seen the blisters on my cheek-bones—big as dollars!”
    “I’m sure you will not be so thin when you are older,” Dora said consolingly, “and your hair would be a very pretty color if only you would wear a hat and take a little care of it.”
    Susie shook her head and sighed again.
    “Oh, it will be too late then, for he will be snapped up by some of those stylish town girls. You see.”
    Dora put buttons in her shirt-waist sleeves in silence.
    “I think he liked to stay here until you quarrelled with him.”
    “I quarrelled with him?”
    “Oh, didn’t you?” Susie was innocence itself. “You treat him so polite, I thought you must have quarrelled—such a chilly polite,” she explained.
    “I don’t think he has observed it,” Dora answered coldly.
    “Oh, yes, he has.” Susie waited discreetly.
    “How do you know?”
    “When you come to the table and say, Good-morning, and look at him without seeing him, I know he’d a lot rather you cuffed him.”
    “What a dreadful word, Susie, and what an absurd idea!”
    Susie noted that Teacher’s eyes brightened.
    “ You’ll be goin’ away, too, pretty soon, and I s’pose you’ll be glad you will never see him again. But,” she added dolefully, “ain’t it awful the way people just meets and parts?”
    Dora was a long time finding that for which she was searching among the clothes hanging on a row of nails, and Susie, rolling her eyes in that direction, was sure, very sure, that she saw Teacher dab at her lashes with the frilly ruffle of a petticoat before she turned around.
    “When did he say he was going?”
    “He didn’t say; but to-day or to-morrow, I should think.”
    “If he cared so much because I am cool to him, he certainly would have asked me why I treated him so. But he didn’t care enough to ask.”
    Teacher’s voice sounded queer even to herself, and she seemed intensely interested in buttoning her boots.
    “Pooh! I know why. It’s because he thinks you like that Smith.”
    “Smith!”
    “Yes, Smith.”
    The jangle of Ling’s triangle interrupted the fascinating conversation.
    “How perfectly foolish!” gasped Dora.
    “Not to Smith,” Susie replied dryly, “nor to Mr. Ralston.”
    Susie looked at the unoccupied chairs at the table as she and Dora seated themselves. Ralston’s, Tubbs’s, Smith’s, and McArthur’s chairs were vacant.
    “Looks like you’re losin’ your boarders fast, Ling,” she remarked.
    “Good thing,” Ling answered candidly.
    The Indian woman gulped her coffee, but refused the food which was passed to her. A strange faintness, accompanied by nausea, was creeping upon her. Her vision was blurred, and she saw Meeteetse Ed, at the opposite end of the table, as through a fog. She pushed back her chair and went into the living-room, swaying a little as she walked. A faint moan caught Susie’s ear, and she hastened to her mother.
    The woman was lying on the floor by the bench