“She’d ought to wear knickerbockers,” murmured the Virginian. “She’d look a heap better ’n some o’ them college students. And she’ll set on potatoes, yu’ say?”
“She thinks she can hatch out anything. I’ve found her with onions, and last Tuesday I caught her on two balls of soap.”
In the afternoon the tall cowpuncher and I rode out to get an antelope.
After an hour, during which he was completely taciturn, he said: “I reckon maybe this hyeh lonesome country ain’t been healthy for Em’ly to live in. It ain’t for some humans. Them old trappers in the mountains gets skewed in the haid mighty often, an’ talks out loud when nobody’s nigher ’n a hundred miles.”
“Em’ly has not been solitary,” I replied. “There are forty chickens here.”
“That’s so,” said he. “It don’t explain her.”
He fell silent again, riding beside me, easy and indolent in the saddle. His long figure looked so loose and inert that the swift, light spring he made to the ground seemed an impossible feat. He had seen an antelope where I saw none.
“Take a shot yourself,” I urged him, as he motioned me to be quick. “You never shoot when I’m with you.”
“I ain’t hyeh for that,” he answered. “Now you’ve let him get away on yu’!”
The antelope had in truth departed.
“Why,” he said to my protest, “I can hit them things any day. What’s your notion as to Em’ly?”
“I can’t account for her,” I replied.
“Well,” he said musingly, and then his mind took one of those particular turns that made me love him, “Taylor ought to see her. She’d be just the schoolmarm for Bear Creek!”
“She’s not much like the eating-house lady at Medicine Bow,” I said.
He gave a hilarious chuckle. “No, Em’ly knows nothing o’ them joys. So yu’ have no notion about her? Well, I’ve got one. I reckon maybe she was hatched after a big thunderstorm.”
“In a big thunderstorm!” I exclaimed.
“Yes. Don’t yu’ know about them, and what they’ll do to aiggs? A big case o’ lightnin’ and thunder will addle aiggs and keep ’em from hatchin’. And I expect one came along, and all the other aiggs of Em’ly’s set didn’t hatch out, but got plumb addled, and she happened not to get addled that far, and so she just managed to make it through. But she cert’nly ain’t got a strong haid.”
“I fear she has not,” said I.
“Mighty hon’ble intentions,” he observed. “If she can’t make out to lay anything, she wants to hatch somethin’, and be a mother anyways.”
“I wonder what relation the law considers that a hen is to the chicken she hatched but did not lay?” I inquired.
The Virginian made no reply to this frivolous suggestion. He was gazing over the wide landscape gravely and with apparent inattention. He invariably saw game before I did, and was off his horse and crouched among the sage while I was still getting my left foot clear of the stirrup. I succeeded in killing an antelope, and we rode home with the head and hind quarters.
“No,” said he. “It’s sure the thunder, and not the lonesomeness. How do yu’ like the lonesomeness yourself?”
I told him that I liked it.
“I could not live without it now,” he said. “This has got into my system.” He swept his hand out at the vast space of world. “I went back home to see my folks onced. Mother was dyin’ slow, and she wanted me. I stayed a year. But them Virginia mountains could please me no more. Afteh she was gone, I told my brothers and sisters goodbye. We like each other well enough, but I reckon I’ll not go back.”
We found Em’ly seated upon a collection of green California peaches, which the Judge had brought from the railroad.
“I don’t mind her any more,” I said; “I’m sorry for her.”
“I’ve been sorry for her right along,” said the Virginian. “She does hate the roosters so.” And he said that he was making a collection of every class of object which he found her treating as eggs.
But Em’ly’s egg-industry was terminated abruptly one morning, and her unquestioned energies diverted to a new channel. A turkey which had been sitting in the root-house appeared with twelve children, and a family of bantams occurred almost simultaneously. Em’ly was importantly scratching the soil inside Paladin’s corral when the bantam tribe of newly born came by down the lane, and she caught sight of them through the bars. She crossed the corral at a run, and intercepted two of the chicks that were trailing somewhat behind their real mamma. These she undertook to appropriate, and assumed a high tone with the bantam, who was the smaller, and hence obliged to retreat with her still numerous family. I interfered, and put matters straight; but the adjustment was only temporary. In an hour I saw Em’ly immensely busy with two more bantams, leading them about and taking a care of them which I must admit seemed perfectly efficient.
And now came the first incident that made me suspect her to be demented.
She had proceeded with her changelings behind the kitchen, where one of the irrigation ditches ran under the fence from the hayfield to supply the house with water. Some distance along this ditch inside the field were the twelve turkeys in the short, recently cut stubble. Again Em’ly set off instantly like a deer. She left the dismayed bantams behind her. She crossed the ditch with one jump of her stout blue legs, flew over the grass, and was at once among the turkeys, where, with an instinct of maternity as undiscriminating as it was reckless, she attempted to huddle some of them away. But this other mamma was not a bantam, and in a few moments Em’ly was entirely routed in her attempt to acquire a new variety of family.
This spectacle was witnessed by the Virginian
