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“Is that so?” she appealed to Tommy. “I can’t tell when they are making fun of me.”

“Yes, ma’am, that’s right,” he assured her.

Estrella passed a strip of the flexible hide playfully about her wrists.

“And if I let that dry that way I’d be handcuffed hard and fast,” she said.

“It would cut you down to the bone,” supplemented Brent Palmer.

She untwisted the strip, and stood looking at it, her eyes wide.

“I–I don’t know why–” she faltered. “The thought makes me a little sick. Why, isn’t it queer? Ugh! it’s like a snake!” She flung it from her energetically and turned toward the ranch house.

CHAPTER SEVEN

ESTRELLA

The honeymoon developed and the necessary adjustments took place. The latter Senor Johnson had not foreseen; and yet, when the necessity for them arose, he acknowledged them right and proper.

“Course she don’t want to ride over to Circle I with us,” he informed his confidant, Jed Parker. “It’s a long ride, and she ain’t used to riding yet. Trouble is I’ve been thinking of doing things with her just as if she was a man. Women are different. They likes different things.”

This second idea gradually overlaid the first in Senor Johnson’s mind. Estrella showed little aptitude or interest in the rougher side of life. Her husband’s statement as to her being still unused to riding was distinctly a euphemism. Estrella never arrived at the point of feeling safe on a horse. In time she gave up trying, and the sorrel drifted back to cow-punching. The range work she never understood.

As a spectacle it imposed itself on her interest for a week; but since she could discover no real and vital concern in the welfare of cows, soon the mere outward show became an old story. Estrella’s sleek nature avoided instinctively all that interfered with bodily well-being. When she was cool and well-fed and not thirsty, and surrounded by a proper degree of feminine daintiness, then she was ready to amuse herself. But she could not understand the desirability of those pleasures for which a certain price in discomfort must be paid. As for firearms, she confessed herself frankly afraid of them. That was the point at which her intimacy with them stopped.

The natural level to which these waters fell is easily seen. Quite simply, the Senor found that a wife does not enter fully into her husband’s workaday life. The dreams he had dreamed did not come true.

This was at first a disappointment to him, of course, but the disappointment did not last. Senor Johnson was a man of sense, and he easily modified his first scheme of married life.

“She’d get sick of it, and I’d get sick of it,” he formulated his new philosophy. “Now I got something to come back to, somebody to look forward to. And it’s a WOMAN; it ain’t one of these darn gangle-leg cowgirls. The great thing is to feel you BELONG to someone; and that someone nice and cool and fresh and purty is waitin’ for you when you come in tired. It beats that other little old idee of mine slick as a gun barrel.”

So, during this, the busy season of the range riding, immediately before the great fall round-ups, Senor Johnson rode abroad all day, and returned to his own hearth as many evenings of the week as he could. Estrella always saw him coming and stood in the doorway to greet him. He kicked off his spurs, washed and dusted himself, and spent the evening with his wife. He liked the sound of exactly that phrase, and was fond of repeating it to himself in a variety of connections.

“When I get in I’ll spend the evening with my wife.” “If I don’t ride over to Circle I, I’ll spend the evening with my wife,” and so on. He had a good deal to tell her of the day’s discoveries, the state of the range, and the condition of the cattle. To all of this she listened at least with patience. Senor Johnson, like most men who have long delayed marriage, was self-centred without knowing it. His interest in his mate had to do with her personality rather than with her doings.