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Fred Waite announced, “Well, I don’t know where to start first, it all looks so edible.”
“You lead the way and we’ll precede,” Charlie Bowdre offered.
“Proceed,” Doc Scurlock corrected.
“Wasn’t no one dint unnerstand him,” George Coe maintained.
Doc noted in his Louisiana drawl, “But I have a jealous regard for the Queen’s English.”
Billy asked, “Would you like some pot roast, John?”
And Middleton said, “Is it good to eat or will it just do?” And then he said, “Just kidding, Miss Chisum.”
Charlie Bowdre asked Doc, “Taters?”
And Doc said, “Lord no. I’m still gnashing this corn.”
Charlie asked their hostess, “We savin the cobs for the privy?”
Sallie primly said no.
Franklin Coe asked the Kid, “Could you give me just a smidgen of that gravy for this biscuit?”
Billy passed the tureen as Sallie’s hand got ever more personal with him. He was so distracted he did not feel at liberty to speak, nor could he stand without the ridicule of his friends over his evident excitement.
Sallie invited the men to discuss the secretary of the interior’s overdue suspension of Governor Axtell and the gossip that President Hayes would replace him with Indiana’s adjutant general, Lew Wallace.
There were no takers except for Charlie Bowdre, who scoffed, “They’s all so crooked they could hide behind a corkscrew.”
“Look at me just putting these victuals away,” Tom Folliard said. “I cain’t seem to quit.”
George Coe asked, “Would there be pie comin, Miss Chisum?”
She nodded. “There’s pie.”
“And here I’m about to explode,” a hefty John Middleton said.
Charlie Bowdre frowned at Walter and William Chisum. “You boys is awful silenced,” he said.
Sallie lifted her hand from the Kid’s lap as she answered, “According to their uncle, children should be seen but not heard.”
The taller teenage boy groused, “We’re not children.” But he hung his head low.
Sallie dabbed her mouth with a linen napkin and said in a regal way, “I have attained a sufficiency. I do hope you all have enjoyed your dinner.”
The Regulators lavished praise on it.
The Navajo cook carried in two hot apple pies with latticed crusts, and Franklin Coe asked, “How’d you get them pie crusts to do like that?”
The Navajo just smiled since English was not available to her when she was tired.
Sallie rose up, thanked the cook in rudimentary Athabaskan, and softly touched the Kid’s hair, saying, “Willy, will you join me on the veranda?”
Tom Folliard leered as he hooted, “Hoo hoo, Kid!”
* * *
She sat next to him in the sloped leather Mexican chairs that were called butacas. She seemed about to comment on the flashing riot of stars overhead but instead inquired if the Kid had read William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
