h 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 Jap 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, Jap?" 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