"Well, now, Mrs. Ferris," he cried, "how did you like her?"
"Well, what did she say?" Merrifield pursued impatiently.
"Why," remarked Mrs. Joe, "for one thing she says I mustn't trust any of you cowboys."
Merrifield burst into a hearty laugh. "That's her!" he cried. "That's her! What else did she say?"
"She told me how I ought to ride, and the kind of horse I ought to get, and--"
"Why, she says I never want to ride any horse that any of you cowboys give me, for you're all bad, and you haven't any consideration for a woman and you'd as lief see a woman throwed off and killed as not."
Merrifield's eyes sparkled in the attractive way they had when he was in a hilarious mood. "Say, did you ever hear the like of that? You'd think, to hear that woman talk, that we was nothing but murderers. What else did she say?"
"Well," remarked the new bride, "she said a good many things."
"You tell me, Mrs. Ferris," Merrifield urged.
"For one thing she said the cowboys was vulgar and didn't have any manners. And--oh, yes--she said that refined folks who knew the better things of life ought to stick together and not sink to the level of common people."
"Now, Mrs. Ferris," remarked Merrifield indignantly, "ain't that a ree-di-culous woman? Ain't she now?"
Mrs. Ferris laughed until the tears came to her eyes. "I think she is," she admitted.
Merrifield carried the news triumphantly to the "boys," and the new bride's standing was established. She became a sort of "honorary member-once-removed" of the friendly order of cowpunchers, associated with them by a dozen ties of human understanding, yet, by her sex, removed to a special niche apart, where the most irresponsible did not fail, drunk or sober, to do her deference. For her ears language was washed and scrubbed. Men who appeared to have forgotten what shame was, were ashamed to have Mrs. Ferris know how unashamed they could be. Poor old Van Zander, whom every one in Billings County had seen "stewed to the gills," pleaded with Joe not to tell Mrs. Ferris that Joe had seen him drunk.
It became a custom, in anticipation of a "shivaree," to send round word to Mrs. Ferris not to be afraid, the shooting was all in fun.
A woman would have been less than human who had failed to feel at home in the midst of such evidences of warmth and friendly consideration. Joe Ferris's store became more than ever the center of life in Medora, as the wife whom Joe had brought from New Brunswick made his friends her friends and made her home theirs also.