The Fighting Shepherdess Part 11

"Never mind--I'll borrow a saddle horse in the morning and go after it."

"Everything will be whipped to ribbons," she declared plaintively.

"I'm not going out this time of night to collect laundry; besides, the exercise would make me hungrier."

"Are you hungry, j.a.p?"

"Hungry! I've been lying here thinking of everything I ever left on my plate since I was a baby!"

Mrs. Toomey sighed deeply.

"Wouldn't a fat club sandwich with chicken, lettuce, thin bacon and mayonnaise dressing--"

"Hus.h.!.+" Toomey exploded savagely. "If you say that again I'll dress and go out and rob a hen roost!"

Mrs. Toomey suggested hopefully:

"Perhaps if you light the lamp, and smoke, it will take your mind off your stomach."

"I surmise that's all there is on it." Toomey lighted the lamp on the table beside the bed and looked at the clock on the bureau.

"Hours yet, my love, before I can gorge myself on a shredded wheat biscuit."

Mrs. Toomey braided a wisp of hair to an infinitesimal end and said firmly:

"j.a.p, we've simply _got_ to do something! Can't you borrow?"

"Borrow! I couldn't throw a rock inside the city limits without hitting some one to whom I owe money. Come again, Old Dear," mockingly.

"Wouldn't Mormon Joe--"

"I'd starve before I'd ask that sheepherder!" His face darkened to ugliness. "I'm surprised at you--that you haven't more pride. You know he broke me, shutting me off from water with his leases. I've explained all that to you."

She was silent; she didn't have the heart to hit him when he was down, though she had her own opinion as to the cause of his failure.

Since she did not reply, he went on vindictively:

"I've come to hate the sight of him--his d.a.m.ned insolence. Every time I see him going into his shack over there," he nodded towards the diagonal corner, "I could burn it."

"It's funny--his building it."

"To save hotel bills when he comes to town. Yes," ironically, "I can see _him_ lending _me_ money." Mrs. Toomey sat up and cried excitedly:

"j.a.p, let's sell something! There's that silver punch bowl that your Uncle Jasper gave us for a wedding present, and Aunt Sarah Page's silver teapot--Mrs. Sudds admires it tremendously."

Toomey's brow cleared instantly.

"We can do that--I'll raffle it--the punch bowl--and get a hundred and fifty out of it easily." He discussed the details enthusiastically, finally blowing out the light and going to sleep as contentedly as though it already had been accomplished.

But in the darkness Mrs. Toomey cried quietly. Selling tickets for a raffle which was for their personal benefit seemed a kind of genteel begging. She wondered that j.a.p did not feel as she did about it. And what would Mrs. Pantin think? What Mrs. Abram Pantin thought had come to mean a great deal to Mrs. Toomey.

The wind had risen to a gale and she thought nervously of fringed napkins and pillow slips--the wind always gave her the "blues" anyway, and now it reminded her of winter, which was close, with its bitter cold--of snow driven across trackless wastes, of gaunt predatory animals, of cattle and horses starving in draws and gulches, and all the other things which winter meant in that barren country. She slept after a time, to find the next morning that the wind still howled and the fringe on her laundry was all she had pictured.

Toomey set forth gaily immediately after breakfast with the punch bowl wrapped in a newspaper, and Mrs. Toomey nerved herself to negotiate for the sale of the teapot to Mrs. Sudds, in the event of his being unsuccessful.

She watched for his return eagerly, but it was two o'clock before she saw him coming, leaning against the wind and clasping the punch bowl to his bosom. Her heart sank, for his face told her the result without asking.

Toomey set Uncle Jasper's wedding gift upon the dining room table with disrespectful violence.

"You must be crazy to think I could sell that in Prouty! You should have known better!"

"Didn't anybody want it, j.a.p?" Mrs. Toomey asked timidly.

"Want it?" angrily. "'Tinhorn' thought it was some kind of a tony cuspidor, and a round-up cook offered me a dollar and a half for it to set bread sponge in."

"Never mind," soothingly, "I'm sure Mrs. Sudds will take the teapot."

"We can't live all winter on a teapot," he answered gloomily.

"But you're sure to get into something pretty quick now."

"When I land, I'll land big--I'll land with both feet," he responded more cheerfully.

"Of course, you will--I never doubt it." Mrs. Toomey endeavored to make her tone convincing. "Let's have tea in the heirloom before we part with it," she suggested brightly. "It's never been used that I can remember."

"It's ugly enough to be valuable," Toomey observed, eyeing the teapot as she took it from the top of the bookcase.

"Solid, nearly, and came over in the _Mayflower_," Mrs. Toomey replied proudly. "We'll have tea and toast and codfish."

"The information is superfluous." Toomey sniffed the air and made a wry face. "I'd as soon eat billposter's paste as codfish."

"To-night we'll have steak--thick, like that--" Mrs. Toomey measured with her thumb and finger as she went into the kitchen.

Toomey eyed the codfish darkly when his wife placed it on the table.

"Sit down, j.a.p," she urged. "The tea will be steeped in just a second.

Don't wait--" A scream completed the sentence.

Toomey overturned his chair as he rushed to the kitchen. He arrived in time to see the lid of the priceless heirloom disappearing in a puddle of pewter. It seemed to the Toomeys that the Fates had singled them out as special objects for their malevolence.

The wind continued to blow as though it meant never to stop. It was a wind of which the people of the East who speak awesomely of their own "gales" and "tempest" wot not.

This wind which had kept Prouty indoors for close to a week came out of a cloudless sky, save for a few innocent looking streaks on the western horizon. It had blown away everything that would move. All the loose papers had sailed through the air to an unknown destination--Nebraska, perhaps--while an endless procession of tumble weed had rolled in the same direction from an apparently inexhaustible supply in the west.

Housewives who had watched their pile of tin cans move on to the next lot found their satisfaction short-lived, for as quickly they acquired the rubbish that belonged to their neighbor on the other side. s.h.i.+ngles flew off and chimney bricks, and ends of corrugated iron roofing slapped and banged as though frantic to be loose. Houses s.h.i.+vered on their foundations, and lesser buildings lay on their sides. Clouds of dust obscured the sun at intervals, and the sharp-edged gravel driven before the gale cut like tiny knives.

Any daring chicken that ventured from its coop slid away as if it were on skates. Pitchforks were useless, and those who had horses to feed carried the hay in sacks. The caged inhabitants stood at their windows and made caustic comments upon the legs and general contour of such unfortunates as necessity took out, while those pedestrians who would converse, upon catching sight of each other made a dive for the nearest telephone pole. There, clinging by an arm like a s.h.i.+pwrecked sailor to a mast, they ventured to opine that it must be "getting ready for something." It seemed as though the earth would soon be denuded of its soil, leaving the rocks exposed like a skeleton stripped of its flesh.

Yet, day after day, it blew without respite, and the effect of it upon different temperaments was as varied as that of drink.