“He proved I did, on the trip back.  He marched up to Ellabelle’s end of the table in his other suit and his new boots and a startling necktie he’d bought at a place near the stockyards in South Omaha, and proposed honourable marriage to her, probably after the first bite of sausage and while she was setting his coffee down.  ‘And you’ve only twenty minutes,’ he says, ’so hurry and pack your grip.  We’ll be wed when we get off the train.’  ‘You’re too impetuous,’ says Ellabelle, looking more than ever as if there was something about her.  ‘There, I was afraid I’d be,’ says Angus, quitting on some steak and breaking out into scarlet rash.  ’What did you think I am?’ demands Ellabelle.  ’Did you think I would answer your beck and call or your lightest nod as if I were your slave or something?  Little you know me,’ she says, tossing her head indignantly.  ‘I apologize bitterly,’ says Angus.  ‘The very idea is monstrous,’ says she.  ’Twenty minutes—­and with all my packing!  You will wait over till the four-thirty-two this afternoon,’ she goes on, very stern and nervous, ‘or all is over between us.’  ’I’ll wait as long as that for you,’ says Angus, going to the steak again.  ’Are the other meals here as good as breakfast?’ ‘There’s one up the street,’ says Ellabelle; ’a Presbyterian.’  ‘I would prefer a Presbyterian,’ says Angus.  ’Are those fried oysters I see up there?’

“That was about the way of it, I gathered later.  Anyway, Angus brought her back, eating on the way a whole wicker suitcase full of lunch that she put up.  And she seemed a good, capable girl, all right.  She told me there was something about Angus.  She’d seen that from the first.  Even so, she said, she hadn’t let him sweep her off her feet like he had meant to, but had forced him to give her time to do her packing and consider the grave step she was taking for better or worse, like every true, serious-minded woman ought to.

“Angus now said he couldn’t afford to fritter away any more time in the cattle business, having a wife to support in the style she had been accustomed to, so he would go to work at his trade.  He picked out Wallace, just over in Idaho, as a young and growing town where he could do well.  He rented a nice four-room cottage there, with an icebox out on the back porch and a hammock in the front yard, and begun to paper and paint and grain and kalsomine and made good money from the start.  Ellabelle was a crackajack housekeeper and had plenty of time to lie out in the hammock and read ‘Lucile’ of afternoons.

“By and by Angus had some money saved up, and what should he do with bits of it now and then but grubstake old Snowstorm Hickey, who’d been scratching mountainsides all his life and never found a thing and likely never would—­a grouchy old hardshell with white hair and whiskers whirling about his head in such quantities that a body just naturally called him Snowstorm without thinking.  It made him highly indignant, but he never would get the things cut.