Free Me Smith by 1870-196 Caroline Lockhart

wearin’ this here white hat and holdin’ up this here long skirt like Teacher on Sunday.
    “Won’t they be surprised when they open the door and see me standin’ on the door-step? I’ll say, ‘How do you do? I’m Susie MacDonald, your relation what’s come to visit you.’ I think this would be better than showin’ up with Running Rabbit and the pack-outfit, until I’d kind of broke the news to ’em. I’d keep Running Rabbit cached in the brush till I sent for him.
    “You see, I’ve thought about it so much that it seems like it was as good as done; but maybe when I start I won’t find it so easy. I might have to ride clear to this Minnesota country, or beyond the big waters to the New York or Connecticut country, mightn’t I?”
    “You might,” McArthur replied soberly.
    “But I’d take a lot of jerked elk, and everybody says grub’s easy to get if you have money, I’d start with about nine ponies in my string, so it looks like I ought to get through?”
    She waited anxiously for McArthur to express his opinion.
    He wondered how he could disillusionize her, shatter the dream which he could see had become a part of her life. Should he explain to her that when she had crossed the mountains and left behind her the deserts which constituted the only world she knew, and by which, with its people, she judged the country she meant to penetrate, she would find herself a bewildered little savage in a callous, complex civilization where she had no place—wondered at, gibed at, defeated of her purpose?
    “Are you sure you have no other clues—no old letters, no photographs?”
    She was about to answer when a tapping like the pecking of a snowbird on a window-sill was heard on the door.
    Susie opened it.
    In ludicrous contrast to the timid rap, a huge figure that all but filled it was framed in the doorway.
    It was “Babe” from the Bar C ranch; “Baby” Britt, curly-haired, pink-cheeked, with one innocent blue eye dark from recent impact with a fist, which gave its owner the appearance of a dissipated cherub.
    “Evenin’,” he said tremulously, his eyes roving as though in search of some one.
    “I lost a horse——” he began.
    “Brown?” interrupted Susie, with suspicious interest. “With a star in the forehead?”
    “Yes.”
    “One white stockin’?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Roached mane?”
    “Ye-ah.”
    “Kind of a rat-tail?”
    “Yep.”
    “Left hip knocked down?”
    “Babe” nodded.
    “Saddle-sore?”
    “That’s it. Where did you see him?”
    “I didn’t see him.”
    “Aw-w-w,” rumbled “Babe” in disgust.
    “Teacher!”
    Dora Marshall’s door opened in response to Susie’s lusty call.
    “Have you seen a brown horse with a star in its forehead, roached mane——”
    “Aw, g’wan, Susie!” In confusion, “Babe” began to remove his spurs, thereby serving notice upon the Schoolmarm that he had “come to set a spell.”
    So the Schoolmarm brought her needlework, and while she explained to Mr. Britt the exact shadings which she intended to give to each leaf and flower, that person sat with his entranced eyes upon her white hands, with their slender, tapering fingers—the smallest, the most beautiful hands, he firmly believed, in the whole world.
    It was not easy to carry on a spirited conversation with Mr. Britt. At best, his range of topics was limited, and in his present frame of mind he was about as vivacious as a deaf mute. He was quite content to sit with the high heels of his cowboy boots—from which a faint odor of the stable emanated—hung over the rung of his chair, and to watch the Schoolmarm’s hand plying the needle on that almost sacred sofa-pillow.
    “Your work must be very interesting, Mr. Britt,” suggested Dora.
    “I dunno as ’tis,” replied Mr. Britt.
    “It’s so—so picturesque.”
    Mr. Britt considered.
    “I shouldn’t say it was.”
    “But you like it?”
    “Not by a high-kick!”
    If there was one thing upon which Mr. Britt prided