Well, I'm Calvin Stammark. Your
father or Hosmer couldn't meet the stage and so they had to let me get
you. Where's your bag?"
She adopted at once an air of comfortable familiarity. "I don't
remember your name," she said, settling beside him in the buggy.
He told her that he had come to this vicinity after she had gone and
that he was about to marry her sister.
"The hell you say!" she replied with cheerful surprise. "Who'd thought
Hannah was old enough to have a fellow!"
They were out of the village now and she produced a paper pack of
cigarettes from a leather hand bag with a florid gilt top. Flooding her
being with smoke she gazed with a shudder at the mountain wall on
either hand, the unbroken greenery sweeping to the sky.
"It's worse than I remembered," she confided, resting against him. "A
person with any life to them would go dippy here. Say, it's fierce! And
yet, inside of me, I'm kind of glad to see it. I used to dream about
the mountains, and this is like riding in the dream. I'm glad you came
for me and let me down easy into things. I suppose they live in the
kitchen home and pa'd lose a currycomb in his beard. Does Hosmer still
beller if he gets the chicken neck?
"Do you sit in the holy parlor for your courting, and ain't that plush
sofa a God-forsaken perch for two little love birds? It's funny how I
remember this and that. I reckon ma's temper don't improve with age.
They kid me something dreadful about saying 'reckon,' in the talent.
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