“Well,” said she, “if you’ve got five thousand dollars come on in. I’ll let you see her if I can.” She approached the bedroom door.
“Jim! Jim!” called a voice he knew very well, a voice full of eagerness now. The door flung open. Taisie, shrouded in blankets, broke out, her radiant face framed in its mass of glowing hair. She flung an arm about the grizzled foreman’s neck. He seemed almost the one friend in all the world for her. “I’m so glad you’ve come!”
“Miss Taisie,” said Jim Nabours succinctly, “here is five thousand dollars. I reckon you’d better put on your pants—if you got nothing else.”
But Taisie sank into a chair, enveloping herself in her blankets. Her eyes were startled.
“Yes, ma’am. I done sold the cows at twenty straight. There’ll be about three thousand head. That’s sixty thousand dollars, ma’am. This here, now, is only part of it. It’ll be in and around sixty thousand. We can get the rest any time we want. I reckon we done right well for you, Miss Taisie.”
Taisie Lockhart looked up at him with sudden tears in her eyes, weak in the reaction from the strain of years.
“I wish you wouldn’t, ma’am; not until I get shaved. Yes, ma’am, we done right well, all things considered. Now, I think you better get about five thousand worth of more clothes.”
“She’s got all the clothes she needs, she told me,” remarked Lou Gore; “a whole trunk of clothes out there on the cart. We haven’t had time to fetch it in yet.”
“Why, shore she has, ma’am! We brung that trunk all the way from Texas. You can’t ride a cow horse in them kind of clothes, ma’am. So Lord Lovel he mounted his milk-white steed. Ain’t she pretty, ma’am? Prettier’n any spotted pup ever was!
“But say, Miss Taisie,” he went on to the girl who still sat huddled in her blankets, “I got to tell you all the news. Dan McMasters has throwed in with the man we sold our cows to. They’re going to start a ranch up North here. We-all are a-goin’ to drive cows up to their ranch next year. Dan, he’s a partner in that; he’s going to be plumb rich. I heard him say he was going to leave Texas, him sher’f and all.
“Far as that goes, if it hadn’t of been for Dan, we maybe wouldn’t have traded. He bid up for all the light stuff, at the same price the other man offered for fours—twenty straight through. Now, Dan——”