It was all rather absurd. But when one member of this life-partnership business is stiff with constraint, you can't expect the other member to fall on his neck and weep. And Dinky-Dunk, for all his nonchalance, looked worried and hollow-eyed. He was in the saddle again, and headed back for Casa Grande, when he caught sight of Peter at work on the windmill. So he loped over to my hired man and had a talk with him. What they talked about I couldn't tell, of course, but it seemed a casual and friendly enough conversation. Peter, in his blue-jeans, dirt-marked and oil-stained, and with a wrench in his hand, looked like an I. W. W. agitator who'd fallen on evil days.
I felt tempted to sally forth and reprove Dinky-Dunk for wasting the time of my hired help. But that, I remembered in time, might be treading on rather thin ice, or, what would be even worse, might seem like snooping. And speaking of snooping, reminds me that a few nights ago I listened carefully at the open window of the bunk-house where Whinstane Sandy was deep in repose. Not a sound, not a trace of a snore, arose from Whinnie's cot.
So my suspicions were confirmed. That old sourdough had deliberately lain awake and tried to trumpet my second man from the precincts which Whinnie felt he'd already preempted. He had attempted to snore poor Peter off the map and away from Alabama Ranch!
The sedatest lives, I suppose, have their occasional Big Surprises. Life, at any rate, has just treated me to one. Lady Alicia Newland's English maid, known as Struthers, arrived at Alabama Ranch yesterday afternoon and asked if I'd take her in. She'd had some words, she said, with her mistress, and didn't propose to be treated like the scum of the earth by anybody.
So the inevitable has come about. America, the liberalizer, has touched the worthy Struthers with her wand of democracy and transformed her from a silent machine of service into a Vesuvian female with a mind and a voice of her own.
I told Struthers, who was still a bit quavery and excited, to sit down and we'd talk the matter over, for rustling maids, in a land where they're as scarce as hen's teeth, is a much graver crime than rustling cattle. Yet if Lady Allie had taken my husband away from me, I didn't see why, in the name of poetic justice, I shouldn't appropriate her hand-maid.