"That's mild!" Andy commented dryly. "Get down, why don't you? I want you to take a look at the inside of my shack and see how bad I need a housekeeper--since you won't take my word for it. I hope every drop of water leaks outa these bags before you get home. I hope old Mister falls down and spills it. I've a good mind not to let you have any, anyway. Maybe you could be starved and tortured into coming down here where you belong."
"Maybe I couldn't. I'll get me a barrel of my own, and hire Simpson to fill it four times a week, if you please! And I'll put a lid with a padlock on it, so Katie dear can't rob me in the night--and I'll use a whole quart at a time to wash dishes, and two quarts when I take a bath! I shall," she asserted with much emphasis, "lie in luxury, James!"
Andy laughed and waved his hand toward One Man Creek. "That's all right--but how would you like to have that running past your house, so you could wake up in the night and hear it go gurgle-gurgle?, Wouldn't that be all right?"
Rosemary Allen clasped her two gloved hands together and drew a long breath. "I should want to run out and stop it," she declared. "To think of water actually running around loose in this world!! And think of us up on that dry prairie, paying fifty cents a barrel for it--and a lot slopped out of the barrel on the road!" She glanced down into Andy's lovelighted eyes, and her own softened. She placed her hand on his shoulder and shook her head at him with a tender remonstrance.
"I know, boy--but it isn't in me to give up anything I set out to do, any more than it is in you. You wouldn't like me half so well if I could just drop that claim and think no more about it. I've got enough money to commute, when the time comes, and I'll feel a lot better if I go through with it now I've started. And--James!" She smiled at him wistfully. "Even if it is only eighty acres, it will make good pasture, and--it will help some, won't it?"
After that you could not expect Andy Green to do any more badgering or to discourage the girl. He did like her better for having grit and a mental backbone--and he found a way of telling her so and of making the assurance convincing enough.
He filled her canvas water-bags and went with her to carry them, and he cheered her much with his aircastles. Afterwards he took the team and rustled a water-barrel and hauled her a barrel of water and gave Kate Price a stony-eyed stare when she was caught watching him superciliously; and in divers ways managed to make Miss Rosemary Allen feel that she was fighting a good fight and that the odds were all in her favor and in the favor of the Happy Family--and of Andy Green in particular. She felt that the spite of her three very near neighbors was really a matter to laugh over, and the spleen of Florence Hallman a joke.
But for all that she gave Andy Green one last warning when he climbed up to the spring seat of the wagon and unwound the lines from the brake-handle, ready to drive back to his own work. She went close to the front wheel, so that eavesdroppers could not hear, and held her front hair from blowing across her earnest, windtanned face while she looked up at him.
"Now remember, boy, do go and file your answer to those contests--all of you!" she urged. "I don't know why--but I've a feeling some kind of a scheme is being hatched to make you trouble on that one point. And if you see Buck, tell him I'll ride fence with him tomorrow again. If you realized how much I like that old cowpuncher, you'd be horribly jealous, James."
"I'm jealous right now, without realizing a thing except that I've got to go off and leave you here with a bunch of lemons," he retorted--and he spoke loud enough so that any eavesdroppers might hear.
