Lainey was nineteen when it all started. Her father, big old Gerald McCarthy, oversaw the Alton stockyards and wagon yard, mainly by using his enormous voice. His interest in the livestock that passed through the yards and the men who traded in it was purely vicarious, but he was terrifically proud of being in the middle of everything. “We’ve got the cream of Alton County right here in our own milk pitchers,” he was fond of telling his daughter. “Everybody that’s anybody in land and livestock, eating at our table. Ain’t many people can say that.”
Lainey, motherless at twelve, through with school at fifteen, cooked three meals a day for her father and one for a long mess table of assorted drovers, buyers, mustangers and drummers. A slight but emphatic girl with rust-brown hair and a temperament like quicksilver, she kept their three-room shack on the edge of the stockyards as neat as an Army barrack, mainly because she didn’t have time for clutter. She knew all the livestock buyers by name and had her own opinions on horse trades and strains of cattle. To the settlers who stopped at the wagon yard she gave advice on feeding mules and how to haggle with the dry-goods storekeeper; she chased and caught small children for their mothers, wiped their noses and occasionally spanked them. She had a retort for every teasing remark tossed at her by the cowboys continually passing through, and sometimes sent them away with their ears burning.
If she hadn’t had so much responsibility to keep her busy, she might have been the kind of child that drives schoolteachers into nervous breakdowns and invents the delightful schemes and plays for which somebody else always seems to get in trouble. Even so, she still got into scrapes sometimes, mainly daring the cowboys to do madcap riding stunts or putting pepper in the coffee of somebody who didn’t have the sense of humor to appreciate it.
She hadn’t been in this sort of trouble for a while, which was likely why she was busy getting into it about the time Bob Russell arrived at the Alton stockyards for the first time. Bob Russell was a mustanger, age twenty-three. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with dark hair, and a pair of blue eyes that made you stop and take a second look at him. In spite of all this, he was a solid citizen. Old Digger—an ex-prospector, who hung around all day with a bony shoulder against corral gateposts and panned for nuggets of human nature to amuse himself—had once summed up Bob’s character nicely: he had enough brains to get him where he needed to be, didn’t talk more than was good for him, and minded his own business real well.
Bob arrived at the stockyards with a string of half-broke mustangs and a pair of pack-horses in tow, and turned the string into one of the pens. He was dusty and grimy and had a three days’ shadow of stubble on his face, but still warranted a second look. So if you add Lainey McCarthy into this equation, you can see why things fell out the way they did.
Lainey, with her apron still on, had been drawn from washing up after dinner to the back stoop of the shack, from whence she was trading friendly insults with Johnny Wagner, a skinny yellow-haired young cowboy with crooked front teeth and a maddening grin. Johnny had declined a dare to slide from a corral fence onto the back of one of the unbroken horses milling around inside, and defended himself with the declaration that Lainey wouldn’t have anything to do with those broncs if he’d dared her. Several of his friends backed him up in chorus.
Lainey only laughed. “I’m not scared of them! Why, I could walk that rail with those broncs kicking up a storm inside and not turn a hair.”
“You never could! You wouldn’t make it halfway,” jeered Johnny cheerfully.
“Fall off or jump off?” said Lainey.
“Either. Whichever of ‘em came first.”
“Want to see me try?” Lainey came down from the stoop, hung her dishtowel on a post and got closer to the fence.
“I bet you don’t.”
“I’ve got nothing to bet, but I’ll take your dare!”
“Shoot, then!” said Johnny.
Lainey, never minding her ankle-length skirts, climbed the corral fence and swung round the post onto the rail. It was a sawmill-planed board a good inch wide, plenty of a grip for the worn soles of her slim scuffed boots. She balanced neatly, her hands spread out, and moved forward. On her right hand the snaky rough-coated mustangs snorted and bit at each other and stirred up a whirlwind of dust. One slip and she would be down among them. In the next pen were Bob Russell’s horses, no less wild, and outside the fence Bob Russell had stopped unloading his pack-horses and turned to watch what was happening. He came up close to the fence, watching her warily, one eye on her nimble feet and another on the whirlwind in the corral, but as she got closer and closer to the next corral post his squinting gaze relaxed a little, almost to amusement. But he hadn’t moved.
Lainey got almost to the post before her right foot slipped, and even then it mightn’t have been her fault. Old Digger examined the rail afterwards and told everybody the board was warped. Down she went into the corral. Bob Russell vaulted over the fence, scooped her up probably before the horses knew she was there, and had her out through the gate that Johnny yanked open and set her on her feet in two seconds flat.
Lainey couldn’t have had much breath left after being swooped around like that, but she didn’t let that bother her; the first thing she did was try to straighten her apron. “You ought to know better than to try that on a corral full of broncs,” said Bob Russell. “Practice on some tame ones.”
“They don’t make tame ones around here,” said Lainey, and leaned to look past him at the fence. “Eight inches!” she said. “I got that close. Johnny, you saw it.”
“Well—”
“A foot,” said one of Johnny’s friends who couldn’t resist making trouble.
“Eight inches or nothing!” called Lainey determinedly over the others’ laughter, and after a short noisy debate they overruled Johnny and said it was eight.
Lainey glanced up at Bob Russell, probably seeing him then for the first time. She took a second look. Then without saying anything more, she picked her dishtowel off the post and headed briskly for the shack. He stood and stared after her for a minute, and then he turned and went back to his horses.
Bob Russell was at the long mess table that night, washed and shaved and looking as much like a different person as somebody can look on short notice. Old Gerald McCarthy, for instance, might not have recognized him if he wasn’t particularly looking, but Lainey did. Maybe because she wasn’t used to being picked out of a scrape by someone who had blue eyes that made you stop and take a second look. And, maybe because he had never seen a girl walk the rail of a corral next to a swarm of mustangs before, Bob decided to sell his horses in Alton instead of going on somewhere else, which he probably would have done anyway.
After that things went just about the way you’d have expected. During her free time Lainey perched on the corral fence and watched Bob Russell break his horses, and during his free time he leaned against the fence and talked to her. In two weeks Lainey had found out his whole family history, what he thought about politics and religion, and a lot about mustanging that she didn’t know before. After that they got confidential and talked about what they’d learned and what they hadn’t learned in school growing up, about Lainey’s mother, and about an aunt she didn’t like and had managed to chase away in a week and a half when the aunt came to visit.
By the time the horses were broken they knew exactly where they stood, and all that was left was putting it into words. Old Digger always claimed to have been a witness from across the yard on the day when Bob Russell made his move, standing by the fence as usual and looking up at Lainey sitting above him. It didn’t take being close by to see the look in Lainey’s shining eyes, as though she could hardly believe she was hearing what she’d hoped for all along, as Bob told her in a few straight simple words that he loved her and wanted her to marry him.
There was nobody around but themselves that night, though, when Lainey slipped out to say goodnight to him by the cattle chute—because saying it once when he left the table with the others just didn’t seem like enough—and he took her in his arms and kissed her; and Lainey, who never did anything halfway, especially if it was her first time, kissed him back in a way that amazed both of them a little. Full moons and nightingales have their backers, but you don’t know how romantic a half-moon above a cattle chute can be till you’ve tried it.
All that was left after that was speaking to Gerald McCarthy, which Bob went to do the next afternoon. He passed Lainey hanging out the wash in the side yard by the shack, and gave her an optimistic wink as he mounted the stoop.
Three minutes later, a subdued roaring was heard inside the shack which gradually made itself felt around the stockyards. More than one person stopped what they were doing and looked up. A minute later Bob Russell reappeared, looking a little dazed and a little insulted, and was met by a friend who happened to be passing.
The friend looked up at the window of the shack, where noises of Gerald could still be heard. “Jumping catbirds,” he said, “what’d you say to him?”
“I told him I wanted to marry his daughter,” said Bob, looking back at the shack with some indignation.
The friend’s eyebrows went up, but he was shrewd enough not to laugh.
The news had broken on Gerald suddenly and unpleasantly. He had no objections to Bob personally, but he took violent objection to him as an upsetter of calculations. Gerald’s hopes for his daughter were vague but grand. To his mind, the cream of Alton County was something that could be skimmed at any time to produce an eligible husband. He saw her as the happy wife of some well-off young rancher or livestock buyer, making life spin merrily in some fine house the way she did at the Alton stockyards. That somebody else might get there first had never entered his mind, and that it had happened made him very cross.
Bob found Lainey, scrubbing energetically away at her washtub near the clothesline. “What did he say?” she asked him, looking up expectantly and pausing in her work.
“Leaving out all the trimmings,” said Bob, “the answer was no, no, and no.”
“Well, of all things!” said Lainey, putting a hand on her hip. “What’s he got against you?”
“Well, we didn’t get down to personalities,” said Bob, “but if I got the gist of it right, he says I’m not good enough for you and ought to have known better than to even ask. He didn’t say why, though.”
“I’d better talk to him,” said Lainey, wiping her hands on her damp apron.
“You sure?”
“Of course. He’s my pa, anyway; I ought to know him pretty well.”
“Well, at least he can’t swear at you,” said Bob, but he said it a little doubtfully.
Gerald was still pacing and fuming when Lainey came into the shack, but she went straight to the point. “Pa,” she said reproachfully, “why’d you get so mad at Bob? I want to marry him, Pa, I really do. Can’t we—”
“No!” thundered Gerald. “Doggone it, I wish you hadn’t gone and got yourself set on him, Lainey, and I dunno why you did. I don’t want you to marry him.”
“But why? He’s just wonderful, Pa, and anyway I heard Old Digger say he heard you tell Joe that he was a fine decent boy, so why don’t you like him now?”
“I didn’t say I didn’t like him, I didn’t say that!”
“Well, if you like him, why can’t I marry him?” Lainey was devastatingly practical.
“‘Cause he ain’t right for you, he just ain’t right! Don’t you see, Lainey, we’ve got the cream of Alton County—”
“Right here in our own milk pitchers. I know,” said Lainey, “but what’s that got to do with it?”
Gerald’s voice was a mix of impatience and wheedling. “You’re only nineteen, Lainey; you don’t want to just up ‘n’ marry the first feller who asks you. You can pick an’ choose from lots better.”
“Pa, I been cooking supper for half the men west of St. Louis since I was fifteen, and I’ve never yet met anybody else I liked well enough to want to marry him.”
“But Lainey”—Gerald gestured helplessly—”you don’t understand, girl. Why, I always figured for you to marry some nice feller who’s got himself set up proper in the world, and—and have the right kind of house, with one of them newfangled cookstoves, and glass in the winders, and them—doilies on the rockin’-chairs in the parlor.”
“Pa, we’ll come to all that later. Bob wants to raise horses for the army; he—”
“Yeah, an’ Johnny Wagner wants to be a cattle king!”
“I don’t want to marry Johnny Wagner!”
“You’re doggone right you don’t!” barked Gerald.
They glared at each other for a minute, slightly sidetracked.
“Instead,” began Gerald again, a little calmer, “you want to marry a two-bit mustanger without a red cent that he won’t spend next week, and he’ll get some bum cowpunching job and have you set up housekeeping in a tar-paper shanty with—”
“Bob’s not going to get a job here. He’s going back mustanging in the mountains again, and I’m going to go with him.”
This time even Gerald’s outrage failed him. “What!”
Lainey explained animatedly, still not fully appreciating the gathering storm. “I told you, Bob wants to raise horses, and he’s got some mares, but he’s got to sell a couple more strings of broncs to get enough money for grazing land. He was going to go back himself and then we’d get married when he came back, but I said I could go along with him. I want to.”
Gerald found his voice again. “No! You ain’t going. You don’t know your own minds, neither of you. He can just go on by himself, and you can—”
“Can stay here and have the cream of Alton County slung in my face every day till he gets back? Not by a Mississippi mile!”
Gerald pawed the air again. “You—you git on out and git back to what you were doin’! I said what I said and I ain’t going back on it.”
Lainey folded her mouth up tight, and then she plunged through the door to the kitchen, her flying skirts slapping the doorframe. There she proceeded to heat more water for the wash with a loud clanging of kettles and stove lids, and gave a fine study in irony by singing “If ever I marry in all of my life, a railroader’s bride I’ll be” in a clear carrying voice. Gerald might not have been able to define irony, but he could feel it—he gave a few more puffs and snorts and then banged out of the front door of the shack.
For two days Gerald glowered, Lainey was more lively and bright-eyed than ever, and Bob Russell minded his own business studiously. It had all the hallmarks of a stalemate. But on the third day Gerald looked a little smug, for he had heard through the grapevine that Bob Russell was having his pack-horses reshod and laying in supplies for a several months’ trip. They’d get over it after not seeing each other for a few months, he thought comfortably. He didn’t deceive himself into hoping that they had quarreled; they were both too practical for that.
On a windy evening shortly following, Lainey sneaked out of the shack to meet Bob down by the cattle chute again. He had his camp outfit lashed to his pack-horses and his overcoat on, and they kissed goodbye for quite some time, as if to make up for the long separation ahead of them. Next morning Bob was gone, and Gerald allowed some more of his good-humor to come back. One point gained, anyway.
For a few days everything was back to normal. Lainey behaved marvelously, so much so that Gerald observed to himself that she must be growing up some. Depending on the point of view, this observation was either remarkably accurate or another good example of irony. The next morning Lainey McCarthy and all her worldly goods were absent from the shack and from the stockyards and wagon yard entire, with no trace left behind.
Gerald roared, considerably. Nobody knew where she was, but he was sure they were all in a giant conspiracy against him. Everybody he questioned was only too thankful to have a clear conscience.
That was a very bad day at the Alton stockyards. Breakfast burned, dinner didn’t happen, and supper was best not mentioned. Most of the men who were there went uptown and got another one afterwards. The truth of Lainey’s whereabouts did not transpire till the next afternoon, when Old Digger turned up. He’d talked to somebody who’d heard it from somebody else. He’d figured Lainey must have left a letter or something (he said), or else he’d have been by sooner. Anyway, Lainey had gotten a ride from an unsuspecting teamster who was leaving the wagon yard at midnight, who took her as far as the nearest stage stop; and then had taken the stage to Bright Hollow, two stops further on the route. Bob Russell met her there and they went out to the Baptist minister’s claim shanty a mile outside town and got married. They’d been a little more practical than even Gerald had figured them for. It was seven-thirty in the evening by the time the ceremony was through and a rainstorm was starting to blow up, but they’d refused the minister’s offer of hospitality and said they’d start right out on the trail; they had a camp outfit and would be just fine, thanks—and had vanished into the night, beyond the range of Old Digger’s informants.
And that, seeing that they had got themselves well and truly married, seemed to be that. Old Gerald, for all the noise he made, wasn’t generally homicidal. His new son-in-law didn’t have to worry about bullets coming unexpectedly from behind. For three days Gerald bellowed, and his right-hand man Joe made what they call comforting noises, and everybody else, mostly understanding, kept their opinions to themselves. Then things more or less slid back into routine.
Without Lainey to look after it, the shack soon became dusty and cluttered. Gerald couldn’t find any properly mended clothes and he despised his own cooking. He stood it as long as he could, and then he hired a woman to cook and clean; and then promptly fired her a few days later. After that he hired and fired new cooks regularly, one every three weeks or so. Everybody knew he was trying to find a replacement for Lainey, but not succeeding.
Now you might be thinking there would be only two ways for this story to go. If it was a literary masterpiece Lainey would suffer untold hardships and find she’d made a dreadful mistake, and come back and admit as much to her father. Or, in the magazine-story mold, Bob Russell would stumble over a gold nugget while hunting wild horses, or else would turn out to be the son of a rich rancher who’d been right in Gerald’s milk pitcher all along. But none of those things happened. It was more complicated and more ordinary than that.
For several months the young Russells camped out in the hills, trailing the herds of wild horses and occasionally closing with them long enough for Bob to cut out some likely specimens. They were very much in love with each other and very happy. Lainey had never lived in the open before, but as she told her new husband, it wasn’t much different from keeping house at the stockyards, except there had been a cookstove and less chance of the roof blowing in on your head. He laughed when she said that. It was their first family joke—the tent had blown down on them that first stormy night they spent in it.
In fact, Lainey’s stockyard upbringing had fitted her very well to be a mustanger’s wife. She cooked their meals—cooking for two was practically a lark after feeding a table of twenty ravenous men every night—washed their clothes and kept them patched together, and administered first aid when Bob came away from a tussle with a horse somewhat the worse for wear. Gerald’s rheumatism and the occasional calamities among the cowboys had given her practice for that.
“I really don’t know what you ever did without me,” said Lainey cheerfully one evening in the tent, as she rubbed liniment into a sore shoulder that Bob had sprained that afternoon.
“I’m not sure either,” said Bob, wincing at the soreness and smiling at the same time.
As Lainey corked the bottle of liniment and wiped her hands he twisted around and lay down with his head in her lap. “You’re not sorry about running off, are you, Lainey? You’ve never complained about anything.”
“Of course not!” said Lainey. “It’s been a lot of fun—and it will be, so long as you don’t break your neck.” She gave him a reproachful dig in the ribs.
“I promise I won’t be dragging you all over creation forever. Soon as I sell these horses I’m going to build you a proper house—with a good roof and glass windows right from the start—”
“And ‘them doilies on the rocking-chairs in the parlor,’” added Lainey mischievously.
Bob craned his neck to look up at her. “Huh?”
“That was one of the things Pa always wanted for me,” Lainey explained.
“Then you can have all the doilies you want,” said Bob comfortably, closing his eyes.
In the late summer, the Russell outfit descended on a small mountain trading-post where prospectors, mustangers and the like replenished their supplies and traded horses and mules, run by a youngish man named Quint. One of their pack-horses had begun coming up lame in the evenings, and Bob wanted to swap it for a sound animal for the last few weeks of their journey. A woman of any stamp was rare in this corner of the mountains, and Lainey, being young and lively and entirely undaunted by her surroundings, completely charmed the handful of men at the post during the two days they stayed over. She was a particular revelation to the delighted Quint, who informed Bob Russell in the course of haggling over the price of a mule that he was a doggoned lucky man.
“I never saw anything to beat her,” declared Quint admiringly. “I tell you, if I could find me a wife as pretty as that who’d be willing to camp out in the hills with me, I’d—I’d take up sheepherding, that’s what I’d do!”
Bob took advantage of his envious admiration to drive a very good bargain for the mule, which fact did not dawn on Quint until well after the Russells were gone. He was good-natured enough to chuckle over it.
Two more weeks and the weather had begun to change. Winds blew more, and nights often threatened rain. They were on their way homeward now, the string of horses complete.
“One more week and we’ll be back in Alton again,” chanted Lainey gaily in a singsong voice as they crested a ridge and headed downward into a narrow canyon, the mustangs linked halter to halter prancing ahead and the mule and the remaining pack-horse plodding behind. “I’ll be awful glad to see Pa. I’ll bet he’s getting impatient for us to be back.”
“You don’t think he’ll still be mad?” said Bob, turning in the saddle to look back at her over his shoulder. “Last I talked to him he didn’t sound in any danger of being glad to see us together at any time.”
“Well, maybe. But he might have simmered down. He generally does after a while once he knows he can’t do anything about it. Of course,” said Lainey, reflectively, “I never crossed him on anything as big as getting married before.”
They were fifty yards down the canyon when a low sound from somewhere behind made Bob look back. The sky overhead was fair, but in the notch visible at the head of the canyon it had turned black. The sound had a tremor to it. Bob swung around and swiftly scanned the sides of the canyon. Some distance ahead on the left a narrow shelf of rock cut back toward them as it climbed under a shallow overhang in the cliff.
“Lainey,” said Bob, “take the pack-horses around and get ahead to the bottom of that ledge up the cliff. Go straight up it and don’t wait for me.”
Lainey looked back, and saw the sky, and knew from his quiet voice what was happening. She kicked her horse into a trot out around the knot of mustangs, pulling the pack-horse and mule after her. Bob was loosening the ropes on the mustangs; he already had his knife in his hand and sliced through them instead of pulling the knots undone. The tremor was louder; the cloudburst was coming up behind them. Bob shouted at the horses and scattered them into a run down the canyon, spurring ahead on their right to turn them up the ledge, the only hope of safety. Now the wind was roaring and the hammer of rain pounding down on them. He saw Lainey ahead, on the slope of the ledge—the little mule was already hitching itself up; Lainey was leaning from her saddle trying to drag the balking buckskin pack-horse after her.
“Let him go!” Bob yelled over the howling of the cloudburst, and Lainey dropped the rope and clung to her horse’s neck as it shouldered its way up the ledge in the face of the whipping water. The loose mustangs clustered at the bottom of the ledge and found their footing: one, two, three, they found their way up and Bob spurred his horse up among them, others coming behind. Ahead, Lainey reached the end of the overhang behind the mule and slid from her horse on the wrong side, between horse and rock wall, and stumbled under the overhang, blinded and gasping. Bob fought his way down out of the saddle among the drenched, frightened horses and worked his way along the rock wall until he reached her. He wrapped his arms around her and held her back under the narrow overhang, shielding her with his body from the hard-driving wind and rain.
It only lasted a few minutes. The cloud rushed by, the wind and rain receded almost as fast as they had come, leaving the file of soaked horses clinging to their sanctuary on the ledge, sodden and subdued, but safe. Bob and Lainey Russell stood on the ledge, wet through and still holding close together, and looked down into the churning brown river booming in the canyon where they had been only moments before. And for the first time in the great adventure of her marriage Lainey let her head fall against her husband’s shoulder and burst into tears.
Several days later, Gerald McCarthy heard some reports about the cloudburst in the foothills from stockyard visitors who had come from that direction. No one knew yet if any lives had been lost, but a dead buckskin horse wearing a V-5 brand and tangled in the remnants of a pack harness had been found in the muddy debris at the bottom of a canyon that had been washed down by the storm. Gerald said nothing about it, but his temper grew thunderous for several days, and he fired his latest cook without even having had time to find fault with her cooking. There were plenty of people in Alton who knew Bob Russell’s pair of pack-horses, the buckskin and the dun with the V-5 brand, and they were well aware that Gerald knew those horses too.
Then on that Thursday Old Digger came hurrying into the stockyards bursting with news. Some men had been arrested in a town forty miles away for killing two men back in the hills and stealing half a dozen horses from them. Some friends of the murdered men had recognized the horses when the thieves brought them down into town. They had a dozen other probably stolen horses with them too, a mix of branded and unbranded stock, and one of them was a dun horse with a V-5 brand, slightly gimpy on the off foreleg.
What had really happened, of course, was that the dun had been stolen out of Quint’s corral just a few days after Bob Russell sold him. But Gerald could not know this, and the unsettling riddle of the pack-horses wound into a more and more vexing knot in his mind. How the two horses had ended up fifty miles apart, with a disaster at either end, was a conundrum that meant a bad answer either way. Gerald hired no new cook at all, and spent more of his time immured in the shack; he stalked the stockyards like a hulking, vengeful ghost, and the most insouciant of the cowboys found excuses to shoulder round corners when they saw him coming.
On Saturday Gerald went into town, and dealt with his usual rounds of business at the bank and stores. When he got back, he left his team standing and stumped off through the corrals in search of Joe, his brow ominous as it had been all week. He rounded a corner by the horse pens and came face to face with Bob Russell—who, looking a little tired and weather-worn, had just shut the gate on a string of bedraggled mustangs that were still doing their best to kick up a rumpus in the corral. Gerald fell back a step and stared; his face turned red and then nearly purple.
“You—you confounded young fool!” he thundered at him. “You was figured to be dead!”
Bob had rather hoped his father-in-law would have mellowed a little with absence, but this didn’t sound promising.
Before he could answer Gerald got his breath and demanded, “Where’s Lainey?”
“Up at the house. She—”
Gerald did not wait to hear, but swung round and stomped off toward the shack looking like he would explode whatever got in his path. But before he had gotten halfway Lainey came running from the shack to meet him calling “Pa! Oh, Pa!” and jumped and flung her arms around his neck like a little girl, and whatever bluster he had been ready to launch was cut rather short.
After that none of Gerald’s grumbling was very convincing, though he still had to do it to save face. The Russells had supper at the shack that night—Lainey had already whipped it back into its old orderly state—and Gerald sat afterwards and listened to their eager explanations of their plans for building a house and raising saddle horses, letting out an occasional short forceful snuffing sound through his big nose that was the closest to approval he would let himself get.
“Well,” he said grudgingly, “it’s better’n’ traipsing through the hills chasing wild ones for a living. There’s no future in that.”
“Of course there is!” said Lainey, a spirited defender of her husband’s profession at any provocation. “There’s ours, right in those broncs in the corral. You said yourself last spring that those horses Bob brought in were the best you’d seen in Alton in three years.”
Gerald coughed. “I don’t recollect saying that or not,” he said, “but I still say roughing it with a pack outfit ain’t no proper way for married folks to live. I hope you ain’t plannin’ on doing any more o’ that before you settle down.”
“Oh, I’m not. Anyway by next summer I’ll have a baby to look after, and so—”
Old Digger happened to be passing by the shack just then, and he stopped to listen and then hurried on to the cattle pens to tell the men there that old Gerald was quarreling with his son-in-law again. Which goes to show that not even students of human nature can be right all the time.