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.
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