"How about that?Will you forget it?Will you--will--will you LIKE me?"She shook her head.
"No," she said.
"No what?You won't like me?Is that it?"Hilma, blinking at the napkin through her tears, nodded to say, Yes, that was it.Annixter hesitated a moment, frowning, harassed and perplexed.
"You don't like me at all, hey?"
At length Hilma found her speech.In her low voice, lower and more velvety than ever, she said:
"No--I don't like you at all."
Then, as the tears suddenly overpowered her, she dashed a hand across her eyes, and ran from the room and out of doors.
Annixter stood for a moment thoughtful, his protruding lower lip thrust out, his hands in his pocket.
"I suppose she'll quit now," he muttered."Suppose she'll leave the ranch--if she hates me like that.Well, she can go--that's all--she can go.Fool feemale girl," he muttered between his teeth, "petticoat mess."He was about to sit down to his supper when his eye fell upon the Irish setter, on his haunches in the doorway.There was an expectant, ingratiating look on the dog's face.No doubt, he suspected it was time for eating.
"Get out--YOU!" roared Annixter in a tempest of wrath.
The dog slunk back, his tail shut down close, his ears drooping, but instead of running away, he lay down and rolled supinely upon his back, the very image of submission, tame, abject, disgusting.
It was the one thing to drive Annixter to a fury.He kicked the dog off the porch in a rolling explosion of oaths, and flung himself down to his seat before the table, fuming and panting.
"Damn the dog and the girl and the whole rotten business--and now," he exclaimed, as a sudden fancied qualm arose in his stomach, "now, it's all made me sick.Might have known it.Oh, it only lacked that to wind up the whole day.Let her go, Idon't care, and the sooner the better."
He countermanded the supper and went to bed before it was dark, lighting his lamp, on the chair near the head of the bed, and opening his "Copperfield" at the place marked by the strip of paper torn from the bag of prunes.For upward of an hour he read the novel, methodically swallowing one prune every time he reached the bottom of a page.About nine o'clock he blew out the lamp and, punching up his pillow, settled himself for the night.
Then, as his mind relaxed in that strange, hypnotic condition that comes just before sleep, a series of pictures of the day's doings passed before his imagination like the roll of a kinetoscope.
First, it was Hilma Tree, as he had seen her in the dairy-house--charming, delicious, radiant of youth, her thick, white neck with its pale amber shadows under the chin; her wide, open eyes rimmed with fine, black lashes; the deep swell of her breast and hips, the delicate, lustrous floss on her cheek, impalpable as the pollen of a flower.He saw her standing there in the scintillating light of the morning, her smooth arms wet with milk, redolent and fragrant of milk, her whole, desirable figure moving in the golden glory of the sun, steeped in a lambent flame, saturated with it, glowing with it, joyous as the dawn itself.
