Most of the argument had been ancient Aryan to Miss Mattie, but the ring of the voice and the little she understood made the tenor plain.  A sudden moisture gathered in her eyes as she said, “You’re too good and honest and generous a man to distrust anybody:  that’s what I think, Will.”

“Mattie, I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,” said he, in an injured voice.  “It ain’t hardly respectable.”

After which there was a silence for a short time.  Then said Miss Mattie, “Do you think you could content yourself here, Will, after all the things you’ve seen?”

Red brightened at the change of topic.  “I’ll tell you how that is:  if I hadn’t any capital, and had to work here as a poor man, I don’t believe I’d take the trouble to try and live—­I’d smother; but having that pleasant little crop of long greens securely planted in the bank where the wild time doesn’t grow, and thusly being able to cavort around as it sweetly pleases me, why, I like the country.  It’s sport to take hold of a place like this, that’s only held together by its suspenders, and try to make a real live man’s town out of it.”

Miss Mattie drew a deep breath of relief.  “You came like the hero in a fairy story, Will, and I was afraid you’d go away like one,” she said.

He reached across the table and patted her hand.  “You’d have had to gone, too,” said he.  “The family’ll stick together.”

She thanked him in a soft little voice.  “Dear me!” she murmured.  “It does seem that you’ve been here a year, Will.”

“Never was told that I was such slow company before.”

“You know perfectly well that that isn’t what I mean.”

“Well, you’ll have to put up with me for a while, whatever I am; insomuch as I’m to be a manufacturer and the Lord knows what.  Then some day I’m going to have an awful hankering for the land where the breeze blows, and then we’ll take a shute for open prairie.  It’s cruelty to animals for me to straddle a horse now, yet there’s where I’m at home, and I’m going to buy me a cayuse of some kind—­say, I ought to get at that; if I’m going around with Lettis I want to ride a horse—­know anybody that’s got a real live horse for sale, Mattie?  No?  Well, I’ll stop in and see the lady that deals the mail—­I’ll bet you what that woman doesn’t know about what’s going on in this camp will never get into history—­be back right away.”

Said he to the post-mistress, “My name’s Saunders, ma’am—­cousin to Miss Mattie.  I just stopped in to find out if you knew anyone that had a riding horse for sale; horse with four good legs that’ll carry me all day, and about the rest I don’t care a frolicsome cuss.”

The post-mistress replied at such length, and with such velocity that Red was amazed.  He gathered from her remarks that a certain Mr. Upton had an animal, purchased of a chance horse dealer, which it was altogether likely he would dispose of, as the first time he had tried the brute it went up into the air all sorts of ways, and caused the owner to perform such tricks before high Heaven as made the angels weep.