Hardy looked up quickly and caught the significance of his pose, but he did not smile. He did not even show an interest in the play.
"How do you figure that out?" he asked, indifferently.
"Oh, I know," drawled Creede. "Got a letter from her."
A single hawk-like glance was the only answer to this sally.
"She says: 'Why the hell don't you write!'" volunteered the cowboy.
"'S that so!" commented Hardy, and then he went on with his cooking.
For a minute Creede stood watching him, his eyes keen to detect the slightest quaver, but the little man seemed suddenly to have forgotten him; he moved about absently, mechanically, dropping nothing, burning nothing, yet far away, as in a dream.
"Huh!" exclaimed Creede, disgusted with his own make-believe, "you don't seem to care whether school keeps or not. I'll excuse you from any further work this evenin'--here's your mail."
He drew a bundle of letters from behind his back and dropped it heavily upon the table, but even then Hardy did not rise.
"Guess the Old Man must've forwarded my mail," he remarked, smiling at the size of the pack. "I've been knocking around so, I haven't received a letter in a year. Chuck 'em on my desk, will ye?"
"Sure," responded Creede, and stepping across the broad living-room he threw the bundle carelessly on the bed.
"You're like me," he remarked, drawing his chair up sociably to supper, "I ain't got a letter fer so long I never go near the dam' post office."
He sighed, and filled his plate with beans.
"Ever been in St. Louis?" he inquired casually. "No? They say it's a fine burg. Think I'll save up my _dinero_ and try it a whirl some day."
The supper table was cleared and Creede had lit his second cigarette before Hardy reverted to the matter of his mail.
"Well," he said, "I might as well look over those letters--may be a thousand-dollar check amongst them."
Then, stepping into his room, he picked up the package, examined it curiously, and cut the cords with his knife.
A sheaf of twenty or more letters spilled out and, sitting on the edge of the bed, he shuffled them over in the uncertain light of the fire, noting each inscription with a quick glance; and as he gathered up the last he quietly tucked three of them beneath the folds of his blankets--two in the same hand, bold and dashing yet stamped with a certain feminine delicacy and grace, and each envelope of a pale blue; the third also feminine, but inscribed in black and white, a crooked little hand that strayed across the page, yet modestly shrank from trespassing on the stamp.