n a coulee-corner for their
camp. And they hadn't the decency to restore what they had wrecked. So
Bud Teetzel and I rode seven miles up the new turn-pike and overtook
those road-workers and I harangued their foreman for a full fifteen
minutes. But it made little impression on him. He merely grinned and
stared at me with a sort of insolent admiration on his face. And when
I had finished he audibly remarked to one of his teamsters that I made
a fine figure of a woman on horseback.

Bud says they're thinking of selling out if they can get their price.
The old folks want to move to Victoria, and Bud and his brother have a
hankering to try their luck up in the Peace River District. I asked
Bud if he wouldn't rather settle down in one of the big cities. He
merely laughed at me. "No thank you, lady! This old prair-ee is
comp'ny enough for me!" he said as he loped, brown as a nut, along the
trail as tawny as a lion's mane, with a sky of steel-cold blue smiling
down on his lopsided old sombrero. I studied him with a less
impersonal eye. He was a handsome and husky young giant, with the joy
of life still frankly imprinted on his face.

"Bud," I said as I loped along beside him, "why haven't you ever
married?"

That made him laugh again. Then he turned russet as he showed me the
white of an eye.

"All the peaches seemed picked, in this district," he found the
courage to proclaim.

This made me trot out the old platitude about the fish in the sea
being as good as any ever caught--and there really ought to be an
excise tax on platitudes, for being addicted to them is quite as bad
as being addicted to alcohol, and quite as benumbing to the brain.

But Bud, with his next speech, brought me up short.

"Say, lady, if _you_ was still in the runnin' I'd give 'em a race
that'd make a coyote look like a caterpillar on crutches!"

He said it solemnly, and his solemnity kept it respectful. But it was
my turn to laugh. And ridiculous as it may sound, this doesn't impress
me as such a dark world as I had imagined! A woman, after all, is a
good deal like mother earth: each has to be cultivated a little to
keep it mellow.

... Where the Female is, there also is the Unexpected. For when I got
home I found that my decorous Poppsy, my irreproachable Poppsy, had
succumbed before the temptation to investigate my new sewing-machine.
And once having nibbled at the fruit of the tree of knowledge, she
went rampaging through the whole garden.