Wanderlust Creek and Other Stories by Elisabeth Grace Foley

the
shack, where noises of Gerald could still be heard. “Jumping
catbirds,” he said, “what’d you say to him?”
    “I told him I wanted to marry his daughter,”
said Bob, looking back at the shack with some indignation.
    The friend’s eyebrows went up, but he was
shrewd enough not to laugh.
    The news had broken on Gerald suddenly and
unpleasantly. He had no objections to Bob personally, but he took
violent objection to him as an upsetter of calculations. Gerald’s
hopes for his daughter were vague but grand. To his mind, the cream
of Alton County was something that could be skimmed at any time to
produce an eligible husband. He saw her as the happy wife of some
well-off young rancher or livestock buyer, making life spin merrily
in some fine house the way she did at the Alton stockyards. That
somebody else might get there first had never entered his mind, and
that it had happened made him very cross.
    Bob found Lainey, scrubbing energetically
away at her washtub near the clothesline. “What did he say?” she
asked him, looking up expectantly and pausing in her work.
    “Leaving out all the trimmings,” said Bob,
“the answer was no, no, and no.”
    “Well, of all things!” said Lainey, putting
a hand on her hip. “What’s he got against you?”
    “Well, we didn’t get down to personalities,”
said Bob, “but if I got the gist of it right, he says I’m not good
enough for you and ought to have known better than to even ask. He
didn’t say why, though.”
    “I’d better talk to him,” said Lainey,
wiping her hands on her damp apron.
    “You sure?”
    “Of course. He’s my pa, anyway; I ought to
know him pretty well.”
    “Well, at least he can’t swear at you,” said
Bob, but he said it a little doubtfully.
    Gerald was still pacing and fuming when
Lainey came into the shack, but she went straight to the point.
“Pa,” she said reproachfully, “why’d you get so mad at Bob? I want
to marry him, Pa, I really do. Can’t we—”
    “No!” thundered Gerald. “Doggone it, I wish
you hadn’t gone and got yourself set on him, Lainey, and I dunno
why you did. I don’t want you to marry him.”
    “But why? He’s just wonderful, Pa, and
anyway I heard Old Digger say he heard you tell Joe that he was a
fine decent boy, so why don’t you like him now?”
    “I didn’t say I didn’t like him, I didn’t
say that!”
    “Well, if you like him, why can’t I marry
him?” Lainey was devastatingly practical.
    “‘Cause he ain’t right for you, he just
ain’t right! Don’t you see, Lainey, we’ve got the cream of Alton
County—”
    “Right here in our own milk pitchers. I
know,” said Lainey, “but what’s that got to do with it?”
    Gerald’s voice was a mix of impatience and
wheedling. “You’re only nineteen, Lainey; you don’t want to just up
‘n’ marry the first feller who asks you. You can pick an’ choose
from lots better.”
    “Pa, I been cooking supper for half the men
west of St. Louis since I was fifteen, and I’ve never yet met
anybody else I liked well enough to want to marry him.”
    “But Lainey”—Gerald gestured helplessly—”you
don’t understand, girl. Why, I always figured for you to marry some
nice feller who’s got himself set up proper in the world, and—and
have the right kind of house, with one of them newfangled
cookstoves, and glass in the winders, and them—doilies on the
rockin’-chairs in the parlor.”
    “Pa, we’ll come to all that later. Bob wants
to raise horses for the army; he—”
    “Yeah, an’ Johnny Wagner wants to be a
cattle king!”
    “I don’t want to marry Johnny Wagner!”
    “You’re doggone right you don’t!” barked
Gerald.
    They glared at each other for a minute,
slightly sidetracked.
    “Instead,” began Gerald again, a little
calmer, “you want to marry a two-bit mustanger without a red cent
that he won’t spend next week, and he’ll get some bum cowpunching
job and have you set up housekeeping in a