Just to convince you, she led him on until Casey told her all about feeding his Ford syrup instead of oil, and all about how it ran over him a few times on the dry lake,--Casey was secretly made happy because she saw at once how easily that could happen, and never once doubted that he was sober! He told her about the goats in Patmos and made her laugh so hard that Babe woke and whimpered a little, and insisted that Casey take her up and rock her again in the old homemade chair with crooked juniper branches hewn for rockers.
With Babe in his arms he told her, too, about his coming out to hunt the Injun Jim mine.

He must have felt pretty well acquainted, by then, because he regaled her with a painstaking, Caseyish description of Lucy Lily and her educated wardrobe, and--because she was a murderous kind of squaw and entitled to no particular chivalry--even repeated her manner of proposing to a white man, and her avowed reason and all.

That was going pretty far, I think, for one evening, but we must keep in mind the fact that Casey and the Little Woman had met almost a month before this, and that Casey had merely thrown wide open the little door to his real self.
At any rate it was after ten o'clock by Casey's Ingersoll when he tucked Babe into her little bed, brought a jelly glass of cold water for the Little Woman to drink in the night, and started for the door.
There he stopped for a minute, debated with his shyness and turned back.
"You mebby moved that steel at the wrong time," he said abruptly, "I guess you musta, the way it happened.

But I was so scared I'd hit yuh, my teeth was playin' the dance to _La Paloma_.

I was in a cold sweat.