widow laughed, "but you are so
agonizingly fond of suspense--"

"Come inside," Carolyn June said as she led the way into the house, "and
in a dark corner--no, that would be too near to the walls and their
proverbial 'ears,' in the center of the room is better--I will expose
the whole diabolical plot!"

At the end of the reading table they stopped and faced each other.

"And now?" Ophelia said, expectantly.

"And now," Carolyn June repeated, her voice low and carefully guarded.
"Listen: Before Ophelia Cobb and Carolyn June Dixon ever arrived at this
Quarter Circle KT their 'lovers' were already picked out for
them--officially chosen, delegated, appointed, foreordained and
everything! The 'arrangements' had all been made--"

"I don't understand," the widow said, bewildered by the rapid flow of
legal-sounding words.

"Nor did I at first," Carolyn June went on, "but I have figured it all
out! I have 'discovered' what all this mysterious hinting about
'arrangements,' 'the agreement,' 'Old Heck's day,' 'Parker's time,'
'Skinny's job,' and so forth means! I have studied it out. Why is Skinny
Rawlins thrown into my lap as my 'regular' lover? It's his 'job'--that
is why! And why the day-and-day-about courting of yourself by Uncle
Josiah and Parker? It is the 'agreement'--the one is to have you one day
and the other the next! Before we came some such arrangement was fixed
up. I am sure of it--"

"Impossible," Ophelia protested, "preposterous!"

"Outrageous!" Carolyn June added vehemently, "but truth just the same!
To start with they didn't want us to come. That telegram lying about
them all having the smallpox proved as much. We were, for some reason or
other, considered 'afflictions,' Why, I don't know. I guess they thought
we were a pair of female vampires or something and had to be disposed of
in advance to prevent our stirring things up and causing a lot of
murders or suicides or duels on the Quarter Circle KT!"

"I can't believe it," Ophelia muttered as if stunned. "Why, that would
be 'dealing' with us just as though we were cattle!"

"That's it!" Carolyn June exclaimed vindictively, her anger for the
moment getting the better of her sense of the ridiculous, "they 'dealt'
in us! More than likely they played poker to decide how to divide us
up--to see who should love you and which should love me! As if the heart
of a woman can be made to run in a groove cut to order by the hand of
any masculine--insect!" she fini