The Trail of the White Mule | Page 5

mine-- a fad, if you
prefer to call him that.
"I consider him a perfect example of human nature in its unhampered,
unbiased state, going straight through life without deviating a hair's

breadth from the viewpoint of youth. A fighter and a castle builder; a
sort of rough-edged Peter Pan. Till he gums soft food and hobbles with
a stick because the years have warped his back and his legs, Casey
Ryan will keep that indefinable, bubbling optimism of spiritual youth.
So tell me all about him. I want to know who has licked, so far; luxury
or Casey Ryan."
The Little Woman laughed and picked up the cards, evening their edges
with sensitive fingers that had not been manicured so beautifully when
first I saw them.
"Well-sir," she drawled, making one word of the two and failing to
keep a little twitching from her lips, "I think it's been about a tie, so far.
As a husband--Casey's a darned good bachelor." Her chuckle robbed
that statement of anything approaching criticism. "Aside from his
insisting on cooking breakfast every morning and feeding me in bed,
forcing me to eat fried eggs and sour-dough hotcakes swimming in
butter and honey--when I crave grapefruit and thin toast and one French
lamb chop with a white paper frill on the handle and garnished with
fresh parsley--he's the soul of consideration. He wants four kinds of
jam on the table every meal, when fresh fruit is going to waste. He's
bullied the laundryman until the poor fellow's reached the point where
he won't stop if the car's parked in front and Casey's liable to be home;
but aside from that, Casey's all right.
"After serving time in the desert and rustling my own wood and living
on bacon and beans and sour-dough bread, I'm perfectly willing to
spend the rest of my life doing painless housekeeping with all the
modern built-in features ever invented; and buying my bread and cakes
and salads from the delicatessen around the corner. I never want to see
a sagebush again as long as I live, or feel the crunch of gravel under my
feet. I expect to die in French-heeled pumps and embroidered silk
stockings and the finest, silliest silk things ever put in a show window
to tempt the soul of a woman. But it took just two weeks and three days
to drive Casey back to his sour-dough can."
"He craved luxury more than you seemed to do," I remembered aloud.

"He did, yes. But his idea of luxury is sitting down in the kitchen to a
real meal of beans and biscuits and all the known varieties of jam and
those horrible whitewashed store cookies and having the noise of the
phonograph drowned every five minutes by a passing street car. Casey
wants four movies a day, and he wants them all funny. He brings home
silk shirts with the stripes fairly shrieking when he unwraps them--and
he has to be thrown and tied to get a collar on him.
"He will get up at any hour of the night to chase after a fire engine, and
every whipstitch he gets pinched for doing something which is
perfectly lawful and right in the desert and perfectly awful in the city.
You saw him," said the Little Woman, "to-day." And she added
wistfully, "It's the first time since we were married that he has ever
talked back--to me.
"And you know," she went on, shuffling the cards and stopping to
regard the joker attentively (though I am sure she didn't know what
card she was looking at), "just chasing around town and doing nothing
but square yourself for not playing according to the rules costs money
without getting you anywhere. Fifty-five thousand dollars isn't so much
just to play with, in this town. Casey's highest ambition now seems to
be nickel disk wheels on a new racing car that can make the speed cops
go some to catch him. His idea of economy is to put six or seven
thousand dollars into a car that will enable him to outrun a
twenty-dollar fine!
"We have some money invested," she went on. "We own this apartment
house--and fortunately it's in my name. So long as the housing problem
continues critical, I think I can keep Casey going without spending our
last cent."
"He did one good stroke of business," I ventured, "when he bought this
place. Apartment houses are good as gold mines these days."
The Little Woman laughed. "Well-sir, it wasn't so much a stroke as it
was a wallop. Casey bought it just to show who was boss, he or the
landlord. The first thing he did when we moved in was to take down
the nicely framed rules that said we must not cook cabbage nor