PAGE 5
The Unheavenly Twins
by
“I came back on business; I will confess I didn’t come to see you,” he said. “I’m only a bone-headed cowpuncher, but even cowpunchers can play square. They don’t, as a rule step in between a man and his wife. You married Spikes, and according to your own tell, you did it to spite me. So I say again, what can I do about it?”
She looked at him dazedly.
“Uh course,” he went on gently, “I won’t stand to see any man abuse his wife, or bandy her name or mine around the country. If I should happen to meet up with Spikes, there’ll likely be some dust raised. And if I was you, and Spikes abused me, I’d quit him cold.”
“Oh, I see,” she said sharply, with an exaggeration of scorn. “You have got over it, then. There’s someone else. I might have known a man can’t be trusted to care for the same woman long. You ran after me and acted the fool, and kept on till you made me believe you really meant all you said–“
“And you married Spikes,” Weary reiterated–ungenerously, perhaps; but it was the only card he felt sure of. There was no gainsaying that fact, it seemed. She had married Spikes in a fit of pique at Irish. Still, it was not well to remind her of it too often. In the next five minutes of tumultuous recrimination, Weary had cause to remember what Shakespeare has to say about a woman scorned, and he wondered, more than ever, if Irish had really cared. The girl–even now he did not know what name to call her–was showing a strain of coarse temper; the temper that must descend to personalities and the calling of unflattering names. Weary, not being that type of male human who can retort in kind, sat helpless and speechless the while she berated him. When at last he found opportunity for closing the interview and riding on, her anger-sharpened voice followed him shrewishly afar. Weary breathed deep relief when the distance swallowed it, and lifted his gray hat to wipe his beaded forehead.
“Mamma mine!” he said fervently to Glory. “Irish was sure playing big luck when she did marry Spikes; and I don’t wonder at the poor devil taking to drink. I would, too, if my little schoolma’am–“
At the ranch, he hastened to make it quite plain that he was not Ira Mallory, but merely his cousin, Will Davidson. He was quite determined to put a stop to all this annoying mixing up of identities. And as for Spikes Weber, since meeting the woman Spikes claimed from him something very like sympathy; only Weary had no mind to stand calmly and hear Irish maligned by anybody.
The next day he rode again to Sleepy Trail to meet the stage, hoping fervently that he would get some word–and that favorable–from Chip. He was thinking, just then, a great deal about his own affairs and not at all about the affairs of Irish. So that he was inside the saloon before he remembered that the bartender knew him for Irish.
The bartender nodded to him in friendly fashion, and jerked his head warningly toward a far corner where two men sat playing seven-up half-heartedly. Weary looked, saw that both were strangers, and puzzled a minute over the mysterious gesture of the bartender. It did not occur to him, just then, that one of the men might be Spikes Weber.
The man who was facing him nipped the corners of the cards idly together and glanced up; saw Weary standing there with an elbow on the bar looking at him, and pushed back his chair with an oath unmistakably warlike. Weary resettled his hat and looked mildly surprised. The bartender moved out of range and watched breathlessly.