HE Happy Family was rolling after—breakfast cigarettes in the mess-house. When they had smoked, they would troop down to the corrals to saddle for their several duties of the day. With round-up over and the cattle thrown back on their winter-range; with a tang of coming snows in the air of a morning; with horses that felt the nearness of winter and humped their backs ominously to the feel of cold saddle-leather and laid their ears flatter than usual when chilly bridle-bits were thrust between their protesting teeth, the Happy Family had relaxed perceptibly from the hurry of summer stress and smoked comfortably inside before riding out where duty and the Old Man impressed.
“Girls,” said Pink authoritatively, licking his cigarette into shape and motioning to Weary for a match, “are all right in their place. I’d hate to go to a dance where there wasn’t any, but if yuh ask me, I’d just as soon swing some other fellow’s girl as my own—supposing I had one, which I thank the Lord I ain’t got—and maybe I’d a little rather. It’s fun to watch the other fellow give yuh the bad-eye during the swinging-process.”
“Nobody with a lick uh sense would turn a hair if yuh swung his girl all night,” fleered Jack Bates, with the safety of many miles between his girl and the dimples of Pink. “There ain’t a female girl living that would take yuh serious. She might like yuh to play with, same as kid girls like to dress up puppies and cats and make ’em set up pretty in the high-chair to a table. She might want to curl your hair for yuh and tie that rosy handkerchief of yours in a pretty bow under your dimpled little chin; but when it come to a showdown, and real love-making, she’d look around for a man.”
Pink lost his dimples at this blunt statement of an unpleasant truth, and for a minute trouble hovered over the Family.
“If your girl wasn’t back East yuh wouldn’t crow quite so loud, or flop your wings so free,” he retorted calmly. “I sure do love to see a man climb a tree and then make a big war-talk. You haven’t got any girl in swinging-distance—and so there’s no use listening to yuh.”
“You can swing my girl,” offered Irish generously, because he hadn’t one to call his own. He, like Pink, gloried in his freedom of feminine thrall.
“The facts uh the case is,” said Pink, getting up and hunting for his hat, “I never saw the girl yet that wasn’t dead willing for me to swing her; and I never saw the human girl yet that I’d go a rod out of my way to swing. They all look alike to me, and that’s straight—and they don’t look good enough to bother with. If I thought I was fool enough to let a girl break up my night’s sleep, or make me do things I didn’t want to do, I’d go bat my head against a rock and pray for a new set uh brains. So help me Josephine, I’d know I sure needed them!”
“Cadwolloper thinks he don’t like girls, but yuh notice he swears by one continual,” drawled Weary. “He’s always calling on Josephine”
“Oh, git!” snapped Pink, and went out and shut the door so that the whole cabin rattled.
All this because Weary’s schoolma’am had been trying to coax the Happy Family into another entertainment, and because-Pink would have none of it.
Pink, whose solitary duty it was to line-ride a certain part of the range which stretched brownly and unevenly away to the northeast, promptly forgot his irritation at the stupidity of the Happy Family, and whistled blithely to himself, a-tingle with the pure pleasure of galloping over the springy sod to the tune of jangling spur-chains and the creak of saddle-leather; to say nothing of the metallic burr of Skeeker—Pink himself is responsible for the outlandish name—rolling industriously the “cricket” in his bit. All that is music to a true son of the range-land, and it was music to Pink, and put him in a very good humor with the world.
Still, the words of Jack Bates rankled now and then when memory was un kind enough to bring them back. Girls did look upon Pink with amused admiration; and Pink resented, secretly and bitterly, the attitude. Surely, it was not his fault that he stood only a meager five-feet-five, stretch as he might; nor was it his fault that he was slim and girlish as to form, and a tanned cherub as to features. How could the average girl understand that a very giant of daredevil courage and manliness hid in that “cunning” personality?