The Fighting Shepherdess

No one could seem to remember that the wind had not always blown, or realize that it would sometime stop. No character was strong enough to maintain a perfect equilibrium after three days of it. Logic or philosophy made no more impression upon the mental state than water slipping over a rock. It set the nerves on edge. Irritation, restlessness and discontent were as uncontrollable as great fear. Two wildcats tied together were not more incompatible than husbands and wives, who under normal conditions lived together happily. Doting mothers became shrews; fond fathers, brutes, lambasting their offspring on the smallest pretext; while seven was too conservative an estimate to place upon the devils of which the children who turned the house into Bedlam seemed to be possessed.

Optimists grew green with melancholia, pessimists considered suicide as an escape from the futility of life, neighbors resurrected buried hatchets. Friends found fault with friends. Enemies vowed to kill each other as soon as the wind let up.

If the combination of wind and altitude had this effect upon phlegmatic temperaments, something of Mrs. Toomey's state may be surmised. With nerves already overwrought this prolonged windstorm put her in a condition in which, as she declared hysterically to her husband, she was "ready to fly."

Lying on his back on the one-time handsome sofa, where he spent many of his waking hours, Toomey responded, grimly: "I'm getting so light on that breakfast-food diet that we'll both fly if I don't make a 'touch' pretty quick. I'm 'most afraid to go out in a high wind without running a little shot in the bottoms of my trousers."

Mrs. Toomey, who was standing at the dining room table laying a section of a newspaper pattern upon a piece of serge, felt an uncontrollable desire to weep. Furthermore, the conviction seized her that, turn and twist the pattern as she might, she was not going to have material enough unless she pieced.

Her lids turned pink and her eyes filled up.

"Isn't it awful, Jap, to think of us being like this?"

"You make me think of a rabbit when you sniffle like that. Can't you cry without wiggling your nose?"

Mrs. Toomey's quavering voice rose to the upper register: "Do you suppose I care how I look when I feel like this?"

"How do you think I feel," ferociously, "with my stomach slumping in so I can hardly straighten up?" He raised a long arm and shook a fist as though in defiance of the Fate that had brought him to this. "I'd sell my soul for a ham! I'm going to Scales and put up a talk."