The floor manager had just called out that it was “ladies’ choice,” and
Happy Jack, his eyes glued in rapturous apprehension upon the thin,
expressionless face of Annie Pilgreen, backed diffidently into a
corner. He hoped and he feared that she would discover him and lead
him out to dance; she had done that once, at the Labor Day ball, and he
had not slept soundly for several nights after.

Someone laid proprietary hand upon his cinnamon-brown coat sleeve, and
he jumped and blushed; it was only the schoolma’am, however, smiling up
at him ingratiatingly in a manner wholly bewildering to a simple minded
fellow like Happy Jack. She led him into another corner, plumped
gracefully and with much decision down upon a bench, drew her skirts
aside to make room for him and announced that she was tired and wanted
a nice long talk with him. Happy Jack, sending a troubled glance after
Annie, who was leading Joe Meeker out to dance, sighed a bit and sat
down obediently–and thereby walked straight into the loop which the
schoolma’am had spread for his unwary feet.

The schoolma’am was sitting out an astonishing number of dances–for a
girl who could dance from dark to dawn and never turn a hair–and the
women were wondering why. If she had sat them out with Weary Davidson
they would have smiled knowingly and thought no more of it; but she did
not. For every dance she had a different companion, and in every case
it ended in that particular young man looking rather scared and
unhappy. After five minutes of low-toned monologue on the part of the
schoolma’am, Happy Jack went the way of his predecessors and also
became scared and unhappy.

“Aw, say! Miss Satterly, I can’t act,” he protested in a panic.

“Oh, yes, you could,” declared the schoolma’am, with sweet assurance,
“if you only thought so.”

“Aw, I couldn’t get up before a crowd and say a piece, not if–”

“I’m not sure I want you to. There are other things to an
entertainment besides reciting things. I only want you to promise that
you will help me out. You will, won’t you?” The schoolma’am’s eyes,
besides being pretty, were often disconcertingly direct in their gaze.

Happy Jack wriggled and looked toward the door, which suddenly seemed a
very long way off. “I–I’ve got to go up to the Falls, along about
Christmas,” he stuttered feebly, avoiding her eyes. “I–I can’t get
off any other time, and I’ve–I’ve got a tooth–”

“You’re the fifth Flying-U man who has ‘a tooth,’” the schoolma’am
interrupted impatiently. “A dentist ought to locate in Dry Lake; from
what I have heard confidentially to-night, there’s a fortune to be made
off the teeth of the Happy Family alone.”

Every drop of blood in Happy’s body seemed to stand then in his face.
“I–I’ll pull the curtain for yuh,” he volunteered, meekly.

“You’re the seventh applicant for that place.” The schoolma’am was
crushingly calm. “Every fellow I’ve spoken to has evinced a morbid
craving for curtain-pulling.”

Happy Jack crumpled under her sarcasm and perspired, and tried to think
of something, with his brain quite paralyzed and useless.

The schoolma’am continued inexorably; plainly, her brain was not
paralyzed. “I’ve promised the neighborhood that I would give a
Christmas tree and entertainment–and when a school-teacher promises
anything to a neighborhood, nothing short of death or smallpox will be
accepted as an excuse for failing to keep the promise; and I’ve seven
tongue-tied kids to work with!” (The schoolma’am was only
spasmodically given to irreproachable English.) “Of course, I relied
upon my friends to help me out. But when I come to calling the roll,
I–I don’t seem to have any friends.” The schoolma’am was twirling
the Montana sapphire ring which Weary had given her last spring, and
her voice was trembly and made Happy Jack feel vaguely that he was a
low-down cur and ought to be killed.

He swallowed twice. “Aw, yuh don’t want to go and feel bad about it; I
never meant–I’ll do anything yuh ask me to.”

“Thank you. I knew I could count upon you, Jack.”

The schoolma’am recovered her spirits with a promptness that was
suspicious; patted his arm and called him an awfully good fellow, which
reduced Happy Jack to a state just this side imbecility. Also, she
drew a little memorandum book from somewhere, and wrote Happy Jack’s
name in clear, convincing characters that made him shiver. He saw
other names above his own on the page; quite a lot of them; seven in
fact. Miss Satterly, evidently, was not quite as destitute of friends
as her voice, awhile back, would lead one to believe. Happy Jack
wondered.

“I haven’t quite decided what we will have,” she remarked briskly.
“When I do, we’ll all meet some evening in the school-house and talk it
over. There’s lots of fun getting up an entertainment; you’ll like it,
once you get started.”

Happy did not agree with her, but he did not tell her so; he managed to
contort his face into something resembling a grin, and retreated to the
hotel, where he swallowed two glasses of whiskey to start his blood
moving again, and then sat down and played poker disasterously until
daylight made the lamps grow a sickly yellow and the air of the room
seem suddenly stale and dead. But Happy never thought of blaming the
schoolma’am for the eighteen dollars he lost.

Neither did he blame her for the nightmares which tormented his sleep
during the week that followed or the vague uneasiness that filled his
waking hour, even when he was not thinking directly of the ghost that
dogged him. For wherever he went, or whatever he did, Happy Jack was
conscious of the fact that his name was down on the schoolma’am’s list
and he was definitely committed to do anything she asked him to do,
even to “speaking a piece”–which was in his eyes the acme of mental
torture.

When Cal Emmett, probably thinking of Miss Satterly’s little book,
pensively warbled in his ear:

  Is your name written there,
  On the page white and fair?

Happy Jack made no reply, though he suddenly felt chilly along the
spinal column. It was.

“Schoolma’am wants us all to go over to the schoolhouse
tonight–seven-thirty, sharp–to help make medicine over this Santa
Claus round-up. Slim, she says you’ve got to be Santy and come down
the stovepipe and give the kids fits and popcorn strung on a string.
She says you’ve got the figure.” Weary splashed into the wash basin
like a startled muskrat.

The Happy Family looked at one another distressfully.

“By golly,” Slim gulped, “you can just tell the schoolma’am to go
plumb–” (Weary faced him suddenly, his brown hair running rivulets)
“and ask the Old Man,” finished Slim hurriedly. “He’s fifteen pounds
fatter’n I be.”

“Go tell her yourself,” said Weary, appeased. “I promised her you’d
all be there on time, if I had to hog-tie the whole bunch and haul yuh
over in the hayrack.” He dried his face and hands leisurely and
regarded the solemn group. “Oh, mamma! you’re sure a nervy-looking
bunch uh dogies. Yuh look like–”

“Maybe you’ll hog-tie the whole bunch,” Jack Bates observed irritably,
“but if yuh do, you’ll sure be late to meeting, sonny!”

The Happy Family laughed feeble acquiescence.

“I won’t need to,” Weary told them blandly. “You all gave the
schoolma’am leave to put down your names, and its up to you to make
good. If yuh haven’t got nerve enough to stay in the game till the
deck’s shuffled yuh hadn’t any right to buy a stack uh chips.”

“Yeah–that’s right,” Cal Emmett admitted frankly, because shyness and
Cal were strangers. “The Happy Family sure ought to put this thing
through a-whirling. We’ll give ‘em vaudeville till their eyes water
and their hands are plumb blistered applauding the show. Happy, you’re
it. You’ve got to do a toe dance.”

Happy Jack grinned in sickly fashion and sought out his red necktie.

“Say, Weary,” spoke up Jack Bates, “ain’t there going to be any female
girls in this opera troupe?”

“Sure. The Little Doctor’s going to help run the thing, and Rena
Jackson and Lea Adams are in it–and Annie Pilgreen. Her and Happy are
down on the program for ‘Under the Mistletoe’, a tableau–the red fire,
kiss-me-quick brand.”

“Aw gwan!” cried Happy Jack, much distressed and not observing Weary’s
lowered eyelid.

His perturbed face and manner gave the Happy Family an idea. An idea,
when entertained by the Happy Family, was a synonym for great mental
agony on the part of the object of the thought, and great enjoyment on
the part of the Family.

“That’s right,” Weary assured him sweetly, urged to further deceit by
the manifest approval of his friends. “Annie’s ready and willing to do
her part, but she’s afraid you haven’t got the nerve to go through with
it; but the schoolma’am says you’ll have to anyhow, because your name’s
down and you told her distinct you’d do anything she asked yuh to.
Annie likes yuh a heap, Happy; she said so. Only she don’t like the
way yuh hang back on the halter. She told me, private, that she wished
yuh wasn’t so bashful.”

“Aw, gwan!” adjured Happy Jack again, because that was his only form of
repartee.

“If I had a girl like Annie–”

“Aw, I never said I had a girl!”

“It wouldn’t take me more than two minutes to convince her I wasn’t as
scared as I looked. You can gamble I’d go through with that living
picture, and I’d sure kiss–”

“Aw, gwan! I ain’t stampeding clear to salt water ’cause she said
‘Boo!’ at me–and I don’t need no cayuse t’ show me the trail to a
girl’s house–”

At this point, Weary succeeded in getting a strangle-hold and the
discussion ended rather abruptly–as they had a way of doing in the
Flying U bunk-house.

Over at the school-house that night, when Miss Satterly’s little, gold
watch told her it was seven-thirty, she came out of the corner where
she had been whispering with the Little Doctor and faced a select,
anxious-eyed audience. Even Weary was not as much at ease as he would
have one believe, and for the others–they were limp and miserable.

She went straight at her subject. They all knew what they were there
for, she told them, and her audience looked her unwinkingly in the eye.
They did not know what they were there for, but they felt that they
were prepared for the worst. Cal Emmett went mentally over the only
“piece” he knew, which he thought he might be called upon to speak. It
was the one beginning, according to Cal’s version:

  Twinkle, Twinkle little star,
  What in thunder are you at?

There were thirteen verses, and it was not particularly adapted to a
Christmas entertainment.

The schoolma’am went on explaining. There would be tableaux, she said
(whereat Happy Jack came near swallowing his tongue) and the Jarley
Wax-works.

“What’re them?” Slim, leaning awkwardly forward and blinking up at her,
interrupted stolidly. Everyone took advantage of the break and
breathed deeply.

The schoolma’am told them what were the Jarley Wax-works, and even
reverted to Dickens and gave a vivid sketch of the original Mrs.
Jarley. The audience finally understood that they would represent wax
figures of noted characters, would stand still and let Mrs. Jarley
talk about them–without the satisfaction of talking back–and that
they would be wound up at the psychological moment, when they would be
expected to go through a certain set of motions alleged to portray the
last conscious acts of the characters they represented.

The schoolma’am sat down sidewise upon a desk, swung a neat little foot
unconventionally and grew confidential, and the Happy Family knew they
were in for it.

“Will Davidson” (which was Weary) “is the tallest fellow in the lot, so
he must be the Japanese Dwarf and eat poisoned rice out of a chopping
bowl, with a wooden spoon–the biggest we can find,” she announced
authoritatively, and they grinned at Weary.

“Mr. Bennett,” (which was Chip) “you can assume a most murderous
expression, so we’ll allow you to be Captain Kidd and threaten to slay
your Little Doctor with a wooden sword–if we can’t get hold of a real
one.”

“Thanks,” said Chip, with doubtful gratitude.

“Mr. Emmett, we’ll ask you to be Mrs. Jarley and deliver the
lectures.”

When they heard that the Happy Family howled derision at Cal, who got
red in the face in spite of himself. The worst was over. The victims
scented fun in the thing and perked up, and the schoolma’am breathed
relief, for she knew the crowd. Things would go with a swing, after
this, and success was, barring accidents, a foregone conclusion.

Through all the clatter and cross-fire of jibes Happy Jack sat, nervous
and distrait, in the seat nearest the door and farthest from Annie
Pilgreen. The pot-bellied stove yawned red-mouthed at him, a scant
three feet away. Someone coming in chilled with the nipping night air
had shoveled in coal with lavish hand, so that the stove door had to be
thrown open as the readiest method of keeping the stove from melting
where it stood. Its body, swelling out corpulently below the iron
belt, glowed red; and Happy Jack’s wolf-skin overcoat was beginning to
exhale a rank, animal odor. It never occurred to him that he might
change his seat; he unbuttoned the coat absently and perspired.

He was waiting to see if the schoolma’am said anything about “Under the
Mistletoe” with red fire–and Annie Pilgreen. If she did, Happy Jack
meant to get out of the house with the least possible delay, for he
knew well that no man might face the schoolma’am’s direct gaze and
refuse to do her bidding,

So far the Jarley Wax-works held the undivided attention of all save
Happy Jack; to him there were other things more important. Even when
he was informed that he must be the Chinese Giant and stand upon a
coal-oil box for added height, arrayed in one of the big-flowered
calico curtains which Annie Pilgreen said she could bring, he was
apathetic. He would be required to swing his head slowly from side to
side when wound up–very well, it looked easy enough. He would not
have to say a word, and he supposed he might shut his eyes if he felt
like it.

“As for the tableaux”–Happy Jack felt a prickling of the scalp and
measured mentally the distance to the door–”We can arrange them later,
for they will not require any rehearsing. The Wax-works we must get to
work on as soon as possible. How often can you come and rehearse?”

“Every night and all day Sundays,” Weary drawled.

Miss Satterly frowned him into good behavior and said twice a week
would do.

Happy Jack slipped out and went home feeling like a reprieved criminal;
he even tried to argue himself into the belief that Weary was only
loading him and didn’t mean a word he said. Still, the schoolma’am had
said there would be tableaux, and it was a cinch she would tell Weary
all about it–seeing they were engaged. Weary was the kind that found
out things, anyway.

What worried Happy Jack most was trying to discover how the dickens
Weary found out he liked Annie Pilgreen; that was a secret which Happy
Jack had almost succeeded in keeping from himself, even. He would have
bet money no one else suspected it–and yet here was Weary grinning and
telling him he and Annie were cut out for a tableau together. Happy
Jack pondered till he got a headache, and he did not come to any
satisfactory conclusion with himself, even then.

The rest of the Happy Family stayed late at the school-house, and Weary
and Chip discussed something enthusiastically in a corner with the
Little Doctor and the schoolma’am. The Little Doctor said that
something was a shame, and that it was mean, to tease a fellow as
bashful as Happy Jack.

Weary urged that sometimes Cupid needed a helping hand, and that it
would really be doing Happy a big favor, even if he didn’t appreciate
it at the time. So in the end the girls agreed and the thing was
settled.

The Happy Family rode home in the crisp starlight gurgling and leaning
over their saddle-horns in spasmodic fits of laughter. But when they
trooped into the bunk-house they might have been deacons returning from
prayer meeting so far as their decorous behavior was concerned. Happy
Jack was in bed, covered to his ears and he had his face to the wall.
They cast covert glances at his carroty top-knot and went silently to
bed–which was contrary to habit.

At the third rehearsal, just as the Chinese Giant stepped off the
coal-oil box–thereby robbing himself miraculously of two feet of
stature–the schoolma’am approached him with a look in her big eyes
that set him shivering. When she laid a finger mysteriously upon his
arm and drew him into the corner sacred to secret consultations, the
forehead of Happy Jack resembled the outside of a stone water-jar in
hot weather. He knew beforehand just about what she would say. It was
the tableau that had tormented his sleep and made his days a misery for
the last ten days–the tableau with red fire and Annie Pilgreen.

Miss Satterly told him that she had already spoken to Annie, and that
Annie was willing if Happy Jack had no objections. Happy Jack had, but
he could not bring himself to mention the fact.

The schoolma’am had not quoted Annie’s reply verbatim, but that was
mere detail. When she had asked Annie if she would take part in a
tableau with Happy Jack, Annie had dropped her pale eyelids and said:
“Yes, ma’am.” Still it was as much as the schoolma’am, knowing Annie,
could justly expect.

Annie Pilgreen was an anaemic sort of creature with pale eyes,
ash-colored hair that clung damply to her head, and a colorless
complexion; her conversational powers were limited to “Yes, sir” and
“No, sir” (or Ma’am if sex demanded and Annie remembered in time). But
Happy Jack loved her; and when a woman loves and is loved, her
existence surely is justified for all time.

Happy Jack sent a despairing glance of appeal at the Happy Family; but
the Family was very much engaged, down by the stove. Cal Emmett was
fanning himself with Mrs. Jarley’s poppy-loaded bonnet and refreshing
his halting memory of the lecture with sundry promptings from Len Adams
who held the book. Chip Bennett was whittling his sword into shape and
Weary was drumming a tattoo in the great wooden bowl with the spoon he
used to devour poisoned rice upon the stage. The others were variously
engaged; not one of them appeared conscious of the fact that Happy Jack
was facing the tragedy of his bashful life.

Before he realized it, Miss Satterly had somehow managed to worm from
him a promise, and after that nothing mattered. The Wax-works, the
tree, the whole entertainment dissolved into a blurred background,
against which he was to stand with Annie Pilgreen, for the amusement of
his neighbors, who would stamp their feet and shout derisive things at
him. Very likely he would be subjected to the agony of an encore, and
he knew, beyond all doubt, that he would never be permitted to forget
the figure he should cut; for Happy Jack knew he was as unbeautiful as
a hippopotamus and as awkward. He wondered why he, of all the fellows
who were to take part, should be chosen for that tableau; it seemed to
him they ought to pick out someone who was at least passably
good-looking and hadn’t such big, red hands and such immense feet. His
plodding brain revolved the mystery slowly and persistently.

When he remounted his wooden pedestal, thereby transforming himself
into a Chinese Giant of wax, he looked the part. Where the other
statues broke into giggles, to the detriment of their mechanical
perfection, or squirmed visibly when the broken alarm clock whirred its
signal against the small of their backs, Happy Jack stood immovably
upright, a gigantic figure with features inhumanly stolid. The
schoolma’am pointed him out as an example to the others, and pronounced
him enthusiastically the best actor in the lot.

“Happy’s swallowed his medicine–that’s what ails him,” the Japanese
Dwarf whispered to Captain Kidd, and grinned.

The Captain turned his head and studied the brooding features of the
giant. “He’s doing some thinking,” he decided. “When he gets the
thing figured out, in six months or a year, and savvies it was a put-up
job from the start, somebody’ll have it coming.”

“He can’t pulverize the whole bunch, and he’ll never wise up to who’s
the real sinner,” Weary comforted himself.

“Don’t you believe it. Happy doesn’t think very often; when he does
though, he can ring the bell–give him time enough.”

“Here, you statues over there want to let up on the chin-whacking or
I’ll hand yuh a few with this,” commanded Mrs. Jarley, and shook the
stove-poker threateningly.

The Japanese Dwarf returned to his poisoned rice and Captain Kidd
apologized to his victim, who was frowning reproof at him, and the
rehearsal proceeded haltingly.

That night, Weary rode home beside Happy Jack and tried to lift him out
of the slough of despond. But Happy refused to budge, mentally, an
inch. He rode humped in the saddle like a calf in its first blizzard,
and he was discouragingly unresponsive; except once, when Weary
reminded him that the tableau would need no rehearsing and that it
would only last a minute, anyway, and wouldn’t hurt. Whereupon Happy
Jack straightened and eyed him meditatively and finally growled, “Aw
gwan; I betche you put her up to it, yuh darned chump.”

After that Weary galloped ahead and overtook the others and told them
Happy Jack was thinking and mustn’t be disturbed, and that he thought
it would not be fatal to anyone, though it was kinda hard on Happy.

From that night till Christmas eve, Happy Jack continued to think. It
was not, however, till the night of the entertainment, when he was
riding gloomily alone on his way to the school-house, that Happy Jack
really felt that his brain had struck pay dirt. He took off his hat,
slapped his horse affectionately over the ears with it and grinned for
the first time since the Thanksgiving dance. “Yes sir,” he said
emphatically aloud, “I betche that’s how it is, all right and I
betche–”

The schoolma’am, her cheeks becomingly pink from excitement, fluttered
behind the curtain for a last, flurried survey of stage properties and
actors. “Isn’t Johnny here, yet?” she asked of Annie Pilgreen who had
just come and still bore about her a whiff of frosty, night air.
Johnny was first upon the program, with a ready-made address beginning,
“Kind friends, we bid you welcome on this gladsome day,” and the time
for its delivery was overdue.

Out beyond the curtain the Kind Friends were waxing impatient and the
juvenile contingent was showing violent symptoms of descending
prematurely upon the glittering little fir tree which stood in a corner
next the stage. Back near the door, feet were scuffling audibly upon
the bare floor and a suppressed whistle occasionally cut into the hum
of subdued voices. Miss Satterly was growing nervous at the delay, and
she repeated her question impatiently to Annie, who was staring at
nothing very intently, as she had a fashion of doing.

“Yes, ma’am,” she answered absently. Then, as an afterthought, “He’s
outside, talking to Happy Jack.”

Annie was mistaken; Happy Jack was talking to Johnny. The schoolma’am
tried to look through a frosted window.

“I do wish they’d hurry in; it’s getting late, and everybody’s here and
waiting.” She looked at her watch. The suppressed whistle back near
the door was gaining volume and insistence.

“Can’t we turn her loose, Girlie?” Weary came up and laid a hand
caressingly upon her shoulder.

“Johnny isn’t here, yet, and he’s to give the address of welcome.
Why must people whistle and make a fuss like that, Will?”

“They’re just mad because they aren’t in the show,” said Weary. “Say,
can’t we cut out the welcome and sail in anyway? I’m getting kinda
shaky, dreading it.”

The schoolma’am shook her head. It would not do to leave out
Johnny–and besides, country entertainments demanded the usual Address
of Welcome. It is never pleasant to trifle with an unwritten law like
that. She looked again at her watch and waited; the audience, being
perfectly helpless, waited also.

Weary, listening to the whistling and the shuffling of feet, felt a
queer, qualmy feeling in the region of his diaphragm, and he yielded to
a hunger for consolation and company in his misery. He edged over to
where Chip and Cal were amusing themselves by peeping at the audience
from behind the tree.

“Say, how do yuh stack up, Cal?” he whispered, forlornly.

“Pretty lucky,” Cal told him inattentively, and the cheerfulness of his
whole aspect grieved Weary sorely. But then, he explained to himself,
Cal always did have the nerve of a mule.

Weary sighed and wondered what in thunder ailed him, anyway; he was
uncertain whether he was sick, or just plain scared. “Feel all right,
Chip?” he pursued; anxiously.

“Sure,” said Chip, with characteristic brevity. “I wonder who those
silver-mounted spurs are for, there on the tree? They’ve been put on
since this afternoon–can’t yuh stretch your neck enough to read the
name, Cal? They’re the real thing, all right.”

Weary’s dejection became more pronounced. “Oh, mamma! am I the only
knock-kneed son-of-a-gun in this crowd?” he murmured, and turned
disconsolately away. His spine was creepy cold with stage fright; he
listened to the sounds beyond the shielding curtain and shivered.

Just then Johnny and Happy Jack appeared looking rather red and guilty,
and Johnny was thrust unceremoniously forward to welcome his kind
friends and still the rising clamor.

Things went smoothly after that. It is true that Weary, as the
Japanese Dwarf, halted the Wax-works and glared glassily at the faces
staring back at him while the alarm clock buzzed unheeded against his
spine. Mrs. Jarley, however, was equal to the emergency. She
proceeded calmly to wind him up the second time, gave Weary an
admonitory kick and whispered, “Come alive, yuh chump,” and turned to
the audience.

“This here Japanese Dwarf I got second-handed at a bargain sale for
three-forty-nine, marked down for one week only,” she explained
blandly. “I got cheated like h–like I always do at them bargain
sales, for it’s about wore out. I guess I can make the thing work well
enough to show yuh what it’s meant to represent, though.” She gave
Weary another kick, commanded him again to “Come out of it and get
busy,” and the Dwarf obediently ate its allotted portion of poison.
And every one applauded Weary more enthusiastically than they had the
others, for they thought it was all his part. So much for justice.

“Our last selection will be a tableau entitled, ‘Under the Mistletoe,’”
announced the schoolma’am’s clear tones. Then she took up her guitar
and went down from the stage to where the Little Doctor waited with her
mandolin. While the tableau was being arranged they meant to play
together in lieu of a regular orchestra. The schoolma’am’s brow was
smooth, for the entertainment had been a success so far; and the
tableau would be all right, she was sure–for Weary had charge of that.
She hoped that Happy Jack would not hate it so very much, and that it
would help to break the ice between him and Annie Pilgreen. So she
plucked the guitar strings tentatively and began to play.

Behind the curtain, Annie Pilgreen stood simpering in her place and
Happy Jack went reluctantly forward, resigned and deplorably
inefficient. Weary, himself again now that his torment was over, posed
him cheerfully. But Happy Jack did not get the idea. He stood, as
Weary told him disgustedly, looking like a hitching-post. Weary
labored with him desperately, his ear strained to keep in touch with
the music which would, at the proper time, die to a murmur which would
be a signal for the red fire and the tableau. Already the lamps were
being turned low, out there beyond the curtain.

Though it was primarily a scheme of torture for Happy Jack, Weary was
anxious that it should be technically perfect. He became impatient.
“Say, don’t stand there like a kink-necked horse, Happy!” he implored
under his breath. “Ain’t there any joints in your arms?”

“I ain’t never practised it,” Happy Jack protested in a hoarse whisper.
“I never even seen a tableau in my life, even. If somebody’d show me
once, so’s I could get the hang of it–”

“Oh, mamma! you’re a peach, all right. Here, give me that sage brush!
Now, watch. We haven’t got all night to make medicine over it. See?
Yuh want to hold it over her head and kinda bend down, like yuh were
daring yourself to kiss–”

Happy Jack backed off to get the effect; incidentally, he took the
curtain back with him; also incidentally–, Johnny dropped a match into
the red fire, which glowed beautifully. Weary caught his breath, but
he was game and never moved any eyelash.

The red glow faded and left an abominable smell behind it, and some
merciful hand drew the curtain–but it was not the hand of Happy Jack.
He had gone out through the window and was crouching beneath it
drinking in greedily the hand-clapping and the stamping of feet and the
whistling, with occasional shouts of mirth which he recognized as
coming from the rest of the Happy Family. It all sounded very sweet to
the great, red ears of Happy Jack.

When the clatter showed signs of abatement he stole away to where his
horse was tied, his sorrel coat gleaming with frost sparkles in the
moonlight. “It’s you and me to hit the trail, Spider,” he croaked to
the horse, and with his bare hand scraped the frost from the saddle.

A tall figure crept up from behind and grappled with him. Spider
danced away as far as the rope would permit and snorted, and two
struggling forms squirmed away from his untrustworthy heels.

“Aw, leggo!” cried Happy Jack when he could breathe again.

“I won’t. You’ve got to come back and square yourself with Annie. How
do yuh reckon she’s feeling at the trick yuh played on her, yuh
lop-eared–”

Happy Jack jerked loose and stood grinning in the moonlight. “Aw,
gwan. Annie knowed I was goin’ to do it,” he retorted, loftily.
“Annie and me’s engaged.” He got into the saddle and rode off,
shouting back taunts.

Weary stood bareheaded in the cold and stared after him blankly.

When came the famine in stock-cars on the Montana Central, and the
Flying U herd had grazed for two days within five miles of Dry Lake,
waiting for the promised train of empties, Chip Bennett, lately
promoted foreman, felt that he had trouble a-plenty. When,
short-handed as he was, two of his cowboys went a-spreeing and
a-leisuring in town, with their faces turned from honest toil and their
hands manipulating pairs and flushes and face-cards, rather than good
“grass” ropes, he was positive that his cup was dripping trouble all
round the rim.

The delinquents were not “top hands,” it is true. They–the Happy
Family, of which Jim Whitmore was inordinately proud–would sooner
forswear their country than the Flying U. But even two transients of
very ordinary ability are missed when they suddenly vanish in shipping
time, and Chip, feeling keenly his responsibilities, rode disgustedly
into town to reclaim the recreants or pay them off and hire others in
their places.

With his temper somewhat roughened by the agent’s report that no cars
were yet on the way, he clanked into Rusty Brown’s place after his
deserters. One was laid blissfully out in the little back room,
breathing loudly, dead to the world and the exigencies of life; him
Chip passed up with a snort of disgust. The other was sitting in a
corner, with his hat balanced precariously over his left ear, gazing
superciliously upon his fellows and, incidentally, winning everything
in sight. He leered up at Chip and fingered ostentatiously his three
stacks of blues.

“What’n thunder do I want to go t’ camp for?” he demanded, in answer to
Chip’s suggestion. “Forty dollars a month following your trail don’t
look good t’ me no more. I’m four hundred dollars t’ the good sence
last night, and takin’ all comers. Good money’s just fallin’ my way.
I don’t guess I hanker after any more night guardin’, thank ye.”

“Suit yourself,” said Chip coldly, and turned away.

Argument was useless and never to his liking. The problem now was to
find two men who could take their places, and that was not so easily
solved. A golden-haired, pink-cheeked, blue-eyed young fellow in
dainty silk negligee, gray trousers, and russet leather belt, with a
panama hat and absurdly small tan shoes, followed him outside.

“If you’re looking for men,” he announced musically, “I’m open for
engagements.”

Chip looked down at him tolerantly. “Much obliged, but I’m not getting
up a garden-party,” he informed him politely, and took a step. He was
not in the mood to find amusement in the situation.

The immaculate one showed some dimples that would have been distracting
in the face of a woman. “And I ain’t looking for a job leading cows to
water,” he retorted. “Yuh shouldn’t judge a man by his clothes,
old-timer.”

“I don’t–a man!” said Chip pointedly. “Run away and play. I’ll tell
you what, sonny, I’m not running a kindergarten. Every man I hire has
got man’s work to do. Wait till you’re grown up; as it is, you’d last
quick on round-up, and that’s a fact.”

“Oh! it is, eh? Say, did yuh ever hear uh old Eagle Creek Smith, of
the Cross L, or Rowdy Vaughan, or a fellow up on Milk River they call
Pink?”

“I’d tell a man!” Chip turned toward him again. “At least I’ve heard
of Eagle Creek Smith, and of Pink–bronco-fighter, they say, and a
little devil. Why?”

The immaculate one lifted his panama, ran his fingers through his
curls, and smiled demurely. “Nothing in particular–only, I’m Pink!”

Chip stared frankly, and measured the slender figure from accurately
dented hat-crown to tiny shoe-tips. “Well, yuh sure don’t look it,” he
said bluntly, at length. “Why that elaborate disguise of
respectability?”

Pink sat him down on an empty beer case in the shade of the saloon and
daintily rolled a cigarette.

“Yuh see, it’s like this,” he began, in his soft voice. “When the
Cross L moved their stock across the line Rowdy Vaughan had charge uh
the outfit; and, seeing we’re pretty good friends, uh course I went
along. I hadn’t been over there a month till I had occasion t’ thump
the daylights out uh one uh them bone-headed grangers that vitiates the
atmosphere up there; and I put him all to the bad. So a bunch uh them
gaudy buck-policemen rose up and fogged me back across the line; a man
has sure got t’ turn the other cheek up there, or languish in ga-ol.”

Pink brought the last word out as if it did not taste good.

“I hit for the home range, which is Upper Milk River. But it was
cussed lonesome with all the old bunch gone; so I sold my outfit and
quit cow-punching for good. I wonder if the puncher lives that didn’t
sell his saddle and bed, and reform at least once in his checkered
career!

“I had a fair-sized roll so I took the home trail back to Minnesota,
and chewed on the fatted calf all last winter and this summer. It
wasn’t bad, only the girls run in bunches and are dead anxious to tie
up to some male human. I dubbed around and dodged the loop long as I
could stand it, and then I drifted.

“I kinda got hungry for the feel of a good horse between m’ legs once
more. It made me mad to see houses on every decent bed-ground, and
fences so thick yuh couldn’t get out and fan the breeze if yuh tried.
I tell yuh straight, old-timer, last month I was home I plumb wore out
mother’s clothes-line roping the gate-post. For the Lord’s sake, stake
me to a string! and I don’t give a damn how rough a one it is!”

Chip sat down on a neighboring case and regarded the dapper little
figure curiously. Such words, coming from those girlishly rosy lips,
with the dimples dodging in and out of his pink cheeks, had an odd
effect of unreality. But Pink plainly was in earnest. His eyes behind
the dancing light of harmless deviltry, were pleading and wistful as a
child.

“You’re it!” said Chip relievedly. “You can go right to work. Seems
you’re the man I’ve been looking for, only I will say I didn’t
recognize yuh on sight. We’ve got a heap of work ahead, and only five
decent men in the outfit. It’s the Flying U; and these five have
worked for the outfit for years.”

“I sure savvy that bunch,” Pink declared sweetly. “I’ve heard uh the
Happy Family before. Ain’t you one uh them?”

Chip grinned reminiscently. “I was,” he admitted, a shade of regret in
his voice. “Maybe I am yet; only I went up a notch last spring. Got
married, and settled down. I’m one of the firm now, so I had to reform
and cut out the foolishness. Folks have got to calling the rest the
Frivolous Five. They’re a pretty nifty bunch, but you’ll get on, all
right, seeing you’re not the pilgrim you look to be. If you were, I’d
say: ‘The Lord help you!’ Got an outfit?”

“Sure. Bought one, brand new, in the Falls. It’s over at the hotel
now, with a haughty, buckskin-colored suitcase that fair squeals with
style and newness.” Pink pulled his silver belt-buckle straight and
patted his pink-and-blue tie approvingly.

“Well, if you’re ready, I’ll get the horses these two hoboes rode in,
and we’ll drift. By the way, how shall I write you on the book?”

Pink stooped and with his handkerchief carefully, wiped the last speck
of Dry Lake dust from his shiny toes. “Yuh won’t crawfish on me, if I
tell yuh?” he inquired anxiously, standing up and adjusting his belt
again.

“Of course not.” Chip looked his surprise at the question.

“Well, it ain’t my fault, but my lawful, legal name is Percival
Cadwallader Perkins.”

“Wha-at?”

“Percival Cad-wall-ader Perkins. Shall I get yuh something to take
with it?”

Chip, with his pencil poised in air, grinned sympathetically. “It’s
sure a heavy load to carry,” he observed solemnly. “How do you spell
that second shift?”

Pink told him, spelling the word slowly, syllable by syllable. “Ain’t
it fierce?” he wanted to know. “My mother must have sure been
frivolous and light-minded when I was born. I’m the only boy she ever
had, and there was two grandfathers that wanted a kid named after ‘em;
they sure make a hot combination. Yuh know what Cadwallader means, in
the dictionary?”

“Lord, no!” said Chip, putting away his book.

“Battle arranger,” Pink told him sadly. “Now, wouldn’t that jostle
yuh? It’s true, too; it has sure arranged a lot uh battles for me. It
caused me to lick about six kids a day, and to get licked by a dozen,
when I went to school. So, seeing the name was mine, and I couldn’t
chuck it, I went and throwed in with an ex-pugilist and learned the
trade thorough. Since then things come easier. Folks don’t open up
the subject more’n a dozen times before they take the hint. And this
summer I fell in with a ju-jutsu sharp–a college-fed Jap that sure
savvied things a white man never dreams except in nightmares. I set at
his feet all summer learning wisdom. I ain’t afraid now to wear my
name on my hatband.”

“Still, I wouldn’t,” said Chip dryly. “Hike over and get the haughty
new war-bag, and we’ll hit the sod. I’ve got to be in camp by
dinner-time.”

A mile out Pink looked down at his festal garments and smiled. “I
expect I’ll be pickings for your Happy Family when they see me in these
war-togs,” he remarked.

Chip turned and regarded him meditatively for a minute. “I was just
wondering,” he said slowly, “if the Happy Family wouldn’t be pickings
for you.”

Pink dimpled wickedly and said nothing.

The Happy Family were at dinner when Chip and Pink rode up and
dismounted by the bed-tent. Chip and Pink went over to where the
others were sitting in various places and attitudes, and the Happy
Family received them, not with the nudges and winks one might justly
expect, but with decorous silence.

Chip got plate, knife, fork, and spoon and started for the stove.

“Help yourself to the tools, and then come over here and fill up,” he
invited Pink, over his shoulder. “We don’t stand on ceremony here.
May look queer to you at first, but you’ll get used to it.”

The Happy Family pricked up its ears and looked guardedly at one
another. This wasn’t a chance visitor, then; he was going to work!

Weary, sitting cross-legged in the shade of a wagon-wheel looked up at
Pink, fumbling shyly among the knives and forks, and with deceitful
innocence he whistled absently:

Oh, tell me, pretty maiden,
Are there any more at home like you?

Pink glanced at him quickly, then at the solemn faces of the others,
and retreated hastily inside the tent, where was Chip; and every man of
them knew the stranger had caught Weary’s meaning. They smiled
discreetly at their plates and said nothing.

Pink came out with heaped plate and brimming cup, and retired
diffidently to the farthest bit of shade he could find, which brought
him close to Cal Emmett. He sat down gingerly so as not to spill
anything.

“Going to work for the outfit?” asked Cal politely.

“Yes, sir; the overseer gave me a position,” answered Pink sweetly, in
his soft treble. “I just came to town this morning. Is it very hard
work?”

“Yeah, it sure is,” said Cal plaintively, between bites. “What with
taming wild broncos and trying to keep the cattle from stampeding, our
shining hours are sure improved a lot. It’s a hard, hard life.” He
sighed deeply and emptied his cup of coffee.

“I–I thought I’d like it,” ventured Pink wistfully.

“It’s dead safe to prognosticate yuh won’t a little bit. None of us
like it. I never saw a man with soul so vile that he did.”

“Why don’t you give it up, then, and get a position at something else?”
Pink’s eyes looked wide and wistful over the rim of his cup.

“Can’t. We’re most of us escaped desperadoes with a price on our
heads.” Cal shook his own lugubriously. “We’re safer here than we
would be anywhere else. If a posse showed up, or we got wind of one
coming, there’s plenty uh horses and saddles to make a getaway. We’d
just pick out a drifter and split the breeze. We can keep on the dodge
a long time, working on round-up, and earn a little money at the same
time, so when we do have to fly we won’t be dead broke.”

“Oh!” Pink looked properly impressed. “If it isn’t too
personal–er–is there a–that is, are you—-”

“An outlaw?” Cal assisted. “I sure am–and then some. I’m wanted for
perjury in South Dakota, manslaughter in Texas, and bigamy in Utah.
I’m all bad.”

“Oh, I hope not!” Pink looked distressed. “I’m very sorry,” he added
simply, “and I hope the posses won’t chase you.”

Cal shook his head very, very gravely. “You can’t most always tell,”
he declared gloomily. “I expect I’ll have an invite to a
necktie-party some day.”

“I’ve been to necktie-parties myself.” Pink brightened visibly. “I
don’t like them; you always get the wrong girl.”

“I don’t like ‘em, either,” agreed Cal. “I’m always afraid the wrong
necktie will be mine. Were you ever lynched?”

Pink moved uneasily. “I–I don’t remember that I ever was,” he
answered guardedly.

“I was. My gang come along and cut me down just as I was about all in.
I was leading a gang—-”

“Excuse me a minute,” Pink interrupted hurriedly. “I think the
overseer is motioning for me.”

He hastened over to where Chip was standing alone, and asked if he
should change his clothes and get ready to go to work.

Chip told him it wouldn’t be a bad idea, and Pink, carrying his haughty
suit-case and another bulky bundle, disappeared precipitately into the
bed-tent.

“By golly!” spoke up Slim, “it looks good enough to eat.”

“Where did yuh pluck that modest flower, Chip?” Jack Bates wanted to
know.

Chip calmly sifted some tobacco in a paper. “I picked it in town,” he
told them. “I hired it to punch cows, and its name is–wait a minute.”
He put away the tobacco sack, got out his book, and turned the leaves.
“Its name is Percival Cadwallader Perkins.”

“Oh, mamma! Percival Cadwolloper–what?” Weary looked utterly at sea.

“Perkins,” supplied Chip.

“Percival–Cad-wolloper–Perkins,” Weary mused aloud. “Yuh want to
double the guard to-night, Chip; that name’ll sure stampede the bunch.”

“He’s sure a sweet young thing–mamma’s precious lamb broke out uh the
home corral!” said Jack Bates. “I’ll bet yuh a tall, yellow-haired
mamma with flowing widow’s weeds’ll be out here hunting him up inside a
week. We got to be gentle with him, and not rub none uh the bloom uh
innocence off his rosy cheek. Mamma had a little lamb, his cheeks were
red and rosy. And everywhere that mamma went–er–everywhere–that
mamma–went—-”

“The lamb was sure to mosey,” supplied Weary.

“By golly! yuh got that backward,” Slim objected. “It ought uh be:
Everywhere the lambie went; his mamma was sure to mosey.”

The reappearance of Pink cut short the discussion. Pink as he had
looked before was pretty as a poster. Pink as he reappeared would have
driven a matinee crowd wild with enthusiasm. On the stage he would be
in danger of being Hobsonized; in the Flying U camp the Happy Family
looked at him and drew a long breath. When his back was turned, they
shaded their eyes ostentatiously from the blaze of his splendor.

He still wore his panama, and the dainty pink-and-white striped silk
shirt, the gray trousers, and russet-leather belt with silver buckle.
But around his neck, nestling under his rounded chin, was a gorgeous
rose-pink silk handkerchief, of the hue that he always wore, and that
had given him the nickname of “Pink.”

His white hands were hidden in a pair of wonderful silk-embroidered
buckskin gauntlets. His gray trousers were tucked into number four tan
riding-boots, high as to heel–so high that they looked two sizes
smaller–and gorgeous as to silk-stitched tops. A shiny, new pair of
silver-mounted spurs jingled from his heels.

He smiled trustfully at Chip, and leaned, with the studiously graceful
pose of the stage, against a hind wheel of the mess-wagon. Then he got
papers and tobacco from a pocket of the silk shirt and began to roll a
cigarette. Inwardly he hoped that the act would not give him away to
the Happy Family, whom he felt in honor bound to deceive, and bewailed
the smoke-hunger that drove him to take the risk.

The Happy Family, however, was unsuspicious. His pink-and-white
prettiness, his clothes, and the baby innocence of his dimples and his
long-lashed blue eyes branded him unequivocally in their eyes as the
tenderest sort of tenderfoot.

“Get onto the way he rolls ‘em–backward!” murmured Weary into Cal’s
ear.

“If there’s anything I hate,” Cal remarked irrelevantly to the crowd,
“it’s to see a girl chewing a tutti-frutti cud–or smoking a cigarette!”

Pink looked up from under his thick lashes and opened his lips to
speak, then thought better of it. The jingling of the cavvy coming in
cut short the incipient banter, and Pink turned and watched intently
the corralling process. To him the jangling bells were sweetest music,
for which ears and heart had hungered long, and which had come to him
often in dreams. His blood tingled as might a lover’s when his
sweetheart approaches.

“Weary, you and Cal better relieve the boys on herd,” Chip called.
“I’ll get you a horse, P–Perkins”–he had almost said “Pink”–”and you
can go along. Then to-night you’ll go on guard with Cal.”

“Yes, sir,” said Pink, with a docility that would have amazed any who
knew him well, and followed Chip out to the corral, where Cal and Weary
were already inside with their ropes, among the circling mass.

Chip led out a gentle little cow-pony that could almost day-herd
without a rider of any sort, and Pink bridled him before the covertly
watching crew. He did not do it as quickly as he might have done, for
he “played to the gallery” and deliberately fumbled the buckle and
pinned one ear of the pony down flat with the head-stall.

A new saddle, stiff and unbroken, is ever a vexation unto its proud
owner, and its proper adjustment requires time and much language. Pink
omitted the language, so that the process took longer than it would
naturally have done; but Cal and Weary, upon their mounts, made
cigarettes and waited, with an air of endurance, and gave Pink much
advice. Then he got somehow into the saddle and flapped elbows beside
them, looking like a gorgeous-hued canary with wings a-flutter.

Happy Jack, who had been standing herd disconsolately with two aliens,
stared open-mouthed at Pink’s approach and rode hastily to camp, fair
bursting with questions and comments.

The herd, twelve hundred range-fattened steers, grazed quietly on a
side hill half a mile or more from camp. Pink ran a quick, appraising
eye over the bunch estimating correctly the number, and noting their
splendid condition.

“Never saw so many cattle in one bunch before, did yuh?” queried Cal,
misinterpreting the glance.

Pink shook his head vaguely. “Does one man own all those cows?” he
wanted to know, with just the proper amount of incredulous wonder.

“Yeah–and then some. This ain’t any herd at all; just a few that
we’re shipping to get ‘em out uh the way uh the real herds.”

“About how many do you think there are here?” asked Pink.

Cal turned his back upon his conscience and winked at Weary. “Oh,
there’s only nine thousand, seven hundred and twenty-one,” he lied
boldly. “Last bunch we gathered was fifty-one thousand six hundred and
twenty-nine and a half. Er–the half,” he explained hastily in answer
to Pink’s look of unbelief, “was a calf that we let in by mistake. I
caught it, after we counted, and took it back to its mother.”

“I should think,” Pink ventured hesitatingly, “it would be hard to find
its mother. I don’t see how you could tell.”

“Well,” said Cal gravely, sliding sidewise in the saddle, “it’s this
way. A calf is always just like its mother, hair for hair. This calf
had white hind feet, one white ear, and the deuce uh diamonds on its
left side. All I had to do was ride the range till I found the cow
that matched.”

“Oh!” Pink looked thoughtful and convinced.

Weary, smiling to himself, rode off to take his station at the other
side of the herd. Even the Happy Family must place duty a pace before
pleasure, and Cal, much as he would liked to have continued the
conversation, resisted temptation and started down along the nearest
edge of the bunch. Pink showed inclination to follow.

“You stay where you’re at, sonny,” Cal told him, over his shoulder.

“What must I do?” Pink straightened his tie and set his panama more
firmly on his yellow curls, for a brisk wind was blowing.

Cal’s voice came back to him faintly: “Just dub around here and don’t
do a darn thing; and don’t bother the cattle.”

“Good advice, that,” Pink commented amusedly. “Hits day-herding off to
a T.” He prepared for a lazy afternoon, and enjoyed every minute.

On his way back to camp at suppertime, Pink rode close to Cal and
looked as if he had something on his mind. Cal and Weary exchanged
glances.

“I’d like to ask,” Pink began timidly, “how you fed that calf–before
you found his mother. Didn’t he get pretty hungry?”

“Why, I carried a bottle uh milk along,” Cal lied fluently. “When the
bottle went empty I’d catch a cow and milk it.”

“Would it stand without being tied?”

“Sure. All range cows’ll gentle right down, if yuh know the right way
to approach ‘em, and the words to say. That’s a secret that we don’t
tell anybody that hasn’t been a cowboy for a year, and rode fourteen
broncos straight up. Sorry I can’t tell yuh.”

Pink went diplomatically back to the calf. “Did you carry it in your
arms, or–”

“The calf? Sure. How else would I carry it?” Cal’s big, baby-blue
eyes matched Pink’s for innocence. “I carried that bossy in my arms
for three days,” he declared solemnly, “before I found a cow with white
hind feet, one white ear, and the deuce uh–er–clubs—-”

“Diamonds” corrected Pink, drinking in each word greedily.

“That’s it: diamonds, on its right hind–er–shoulders—-”

“The calf’s was on its left side,” reminded Pink reproachfully. “I
don’t believe you found the right mother, after all!”

“Yeah, I sure did, all right,” contended Cal earnestly. “I know,
’cause she was that grateful, when she seen me heave in sight over a
hill a mile away, she come up on the gallop, a-bawling, and–er–licked
my hand!”

That settled it, of course. Pink dismounted stiffly and walked
painfully to the cook-tent. Ten months out of saddle–with a new,
unbroken one to begin on again–told, even upon Pink, and made for
extreme discomfort.

When he had eaten, hungrily and in silence, responding to the mildly
ironical sociability of his fellows with a brevity which only his soft
voice saved from bruskness, he unrolled his new bed and lay down with
not a thought for the part he was playing. He heard with absolute
indifference Weary’s remark outside, that “Cadwolloper’s about all in;
day-herding’s too strenuous for him.” The last that came to him, some
one was chanting relishfully:

Mamma had a precious lamby his cheeks were red and rosy;
And when he rode the festive bronk, he tumbled on his nosey.

There was more; but Pink had gone to sleep, and so missed it.

At sundown he awoke and went out to saddle the night horse Chip had
caught for him, and then went to bed again. When shaken gently for
middle guard, he dressed sleepily, added a pair of white Angora chaps
to his afternoon attire, and stumbled out into the murky moonlight.

Guided and coached by Cal, he took his station and began that
monotonous round which had been a part of the life he loved best.
Though stiff and sore from unaccustomed riding, Pink felt quite content
to be where he was; to watch the quiet land and the peaceful,
slumbering herd; with the drifting gray clouds above, and the moon
swimming, head under, in their midst. Twice in a complete round he met
Cal, going in opposite direction. At the second round Cal stopped him.

“How yuh coming?” he queried cheerfully.

“All right, thank you,” said Pink.

“Yuh want to watch out for a lop-horned critter over on the other
side,” Cal went on, in confidential tone. “He keeps trying to sneak
out uh the bunch. Don’t let him get away; if he goes, take after him
and fog him back.”

“He won’t get away from me, if I can help it,” Pink promised, and Cal
rode on, with Pink smiling maliciously after him.

As he neared the opposite side, a dim shape angled slowly out before
him, moving aimlessly away from the sleeping herd. Pink followed.
Farther they went, and faster. Into a little hollow went the
“critter”, and circled. Pink took down his rope, let loose a good ten
feet of it, and spurred unexpectedly close to it.

Whack! The rope landed with precision on the bowed shoulders of Cal.
“Yuh will try to fool your betters, will yuh?” Whack! “I guess I can
point out a critter that won’t stray out uh the bunch again fer a
spell!” Whack!

Cal straightened, gasping astonishment, in the saddle, pulled up with a
jerk, and got off, in unlovely mood.

“And I can point to a little mamma’s lamb that won’t take down his rope
to his betters again, either!” he cried angrily. “Climb down and get
your ears cuffed proper, yuh darned, pink little smart Aleck; or them
shiny heels’ll break your pretty neck. Thump me with a rope, will yuh?”

Pink got down. Immediately after, to use a slang term, they “mixed.”
Presently Cal, stretched the long length of him in the grass, with Pink
sitting comfortably upon his middle, looked up at the dizzying swim of
the moon, saw new and uncharted stars, and nearer, dimly revealed in
the half-light, the self-satisfied, cherubic face of Pink.

He essayed to rise and continue the discussion, and discovered a quite
surprising state of affairs. He could scarcely move: and the more he
tried the more painful became Pink’s diabolical hold of him. He
blinked and puzzled over the mystery.

“Of all the bone-headed, feeble-minded sons-uh-guns it’s ever been my
duty and pleasure to reconstruct,” announced Pink melodiously, “you
sure take the sour-dough biscuit. You’re a song that’s been tried on
the cattle and failed t’ connect. You’re the last wail of a coyote
dying in the dim distance. For a man that’s been lynched and cut down
and waiting for another yank, you certainly–are–mild! You’re the
tamest thing that ever happened. A lady could handle yuh with safety
and ease. You’re a children’s playmate. For a deep-dyed desperado
that’s wanted for manslaughter in Texas, perjury in South Dakota, and
bigamy in Utah, you’re the last feeble whisper of a summer breeze.
You cuff my ears proper? Oh, my! and oh, fudge! It is to laugh!”

Cat, battered as to features and bewildered as to mind, blinked again
and grinned feebly.

“Yuh try an old gag that I wore out on humans of your ilk in Wyoming,”
went on Pink, warming to the subject. “Yuh load me with stuff that
would bring the heehaw from a sheep-herder. Yuh can’t even lie
consistent to a pilgrim. You’re a story that’s been told and
forgotten, a canto that won’t rhyme, blank verse with club feet.
You’re the last, horrible example of a declining race. You’re extinct.”

“Say”–Pink’s fists kneaded energetically Cal’s suffering
diaphragm.–”are yuh–all–ba-a-d?”

“Oh, Lord! No. I’m dead gentle. Lemme up.”

“D’yuh think that critter will quit the bunch ag’in to-night?”

“He ain’t liable to,” Cal assured him meekly. “Say, who the devil are
yuh anyhow?”

“I’m Percival Cadwallader Perkins. Do yuh like that name? Do yuh
think it drips sweetness and poetry, like a card uh honey?”

“Ouch! It–it’s swell!”

“You’re a dam’ liar,” declared Pink, getting up. “Furthermore, yuh old
chuckle-head, yuh ought t’ know better than try t’ run any ranikaboos
on me. I’ve got your pedigree, right back to the Flood; and it’s safe
betting yuh got mine, and don’t know it. Your best girl happens to be
my cousin.”

Cal scrambled slowly and painfully to his feet. “Then you’re Milk
River Pink. I might uh guessed it,” he sighed.

“I cannot tell a lie,” Pink averred. “Only, plain Pink’ll do for me.
Where d’yuh suppose the bunch is by this time?”

They mounted and rode back together. Cal was deeply thoughtful.

“Say,” he said suddenly, just as they parted to ride their rounds, “the
boys’ll be tickled plumb to death. We’ve been wishing you’d blow in
here ever since the Cross L quit the country.”

Pink drew rein and looked back, resting one hand on the cantle. “My
gentle friend,” he warned, “yuh needn’t break your neck spreading the
glad tidings. Yuh better let them frivolous youths wise-up in their
own playful way, same as you done.”

“Sure,” agreed Cal, passing his fingers gingerly over certain portions
of his face. “I ain’t a hog. I’m willing they should have some sport
with yuh, too.”

Next morning, when Cal appeared at breakfast with a slight limp and
several inches of cuticle missing from his features, the Happy Family
learned that his horse had fallen down with him as he was turning a
stray back into the herd.

Chip looked up quizzically and then hid a smile behind his coffee-cup.

It was Weary that afternoon on dayherd who indulged his mendacity for
the benefit of Pink; and his remarks were but paving-stones for a
scheme hatched overnight by the Happy Family.

Weary began by looking doleful and emptying his lungs in sighs deep and
sorrowful. When Pink, rising obligingly to the bait, asked him if he
felt bad. Weary only sighed the more. Then, growing confidential, he
told how he had dreamed a dream the night before. With picturesque
language, he detailed the horror of it. He was guilty of murder, he
confessed, and the crime weighed heavily on his conscience.

“Not only that,” he went on, “but I know that death is camping on my
trail. That dream haunts me. I feel that my days are numbered in
words uh one syllable. That dream’ll come true; you see if it don’t!”

“I–I wouldn’t worry over just a bad dream, Mr. Weary,” comforted Pink.

“But that ain’t all. I woke up in a cold sweat, and went outside. And
there in the clouds, perfect as life, I seen a posse uh men galloping
up from the South. Down South,” he explained sadly, “sleeps my
victim–a white-headed, innocent old man. That posse is sure headed
for me, Mr. Perkins.”

“Still, it was only clouds.”

“Wait till I tell yuh,” persisted Weary, stubbornly refusing comfort.
“When I got up this morning I put my boots on the wrong feet; that’s a
sure sign that your dream’ll come true. At breakfast I upset the can
uh salt; which is bad luck. Mr. Perkins, I’m a lost man.”

Pink’s eyes widened; he looked like a child listening to a story of
goblins. “If I can help you, Mr. Weary, I will,” he promised
generously.

“Will yuh be my friend? Will yuh let me lean on yuh in my dark hours?”
Weary’s voice shook with emotion.

Pink said that he would, and he seemed very sympathetic and anxious for
Weary’s safety. Several times during their shift Weary rode around to
where Pink was sitting uneasily his horse, and spoke feelingly of his
crime and the black trouble that loomed so closer and told Pink how
much comfort it was to be able to talk confidentially with a friend.

When Pink went out that night to stand his shift, he found Weary at his
side instead of Cal. Weary explained that Cal was feeling pretty bum
on account of that fall he had got, and, as Weary couldn’t sleep,
anyway, he had offered to stand in Cal’s place. Pink scented mischief.

This night the moon shone brightly at intervals, with patches of
silvery clouds racing before the wind and chasing black splotches of
shadows over the sleeping land. For all that, the cattle lay quiet,
and the monotony of circling the herd was often broken by Weary and
Pink with little talks, as they turned and rode together.

“Mr. Perkins, fate’s a-crowding me close,” said Weary gloomily, when an
hour had gone by. “I feel as if–what’s that?”

Voices raised in excited talk came faintly and fitfully on the wind.
Weary turned his horse, with a glance toward the cattle, and, beckoning
Pink to follow, rode out to the right.

“It’s the posse!” he hissed. “They’ll go to the herd so look for me.
Mr. Perkins, the time has come to fly. If only I had a horse that
could drift!”

Pink thought he caught the meaning. “Is–is mine any good, Mr. Weary?”
he quavered. “If he is, you–you can have him. I–I’ll stay and–and
fool them as–long as I can.”

“Perkins,” said Weary solemnly, “you’re sure all right! Let that posse
think you’re the man they want for half an hour, and I’m safe. I’ll
never forget yuh!”

He had not thought of changing horses, but the temptation mastered him.
He was riding a little sorrel, Glory by name, that could beat even the
Happy Family itself for unexpected deviltry. Yielding to Pink’s
persuasions, he changed mounts, clasped Pink’s hand affectionately, and
sped away just as the posse appeared over a rise, riding furiously.

Pink, playing his part, started toward them, then wheeled and sped away
in the direction that would lead them off Weary’s trail. That is, he
sped for ten rods or so. After that he seemed to revolve on an axis,
and there was an astonishing number of revolutions to the minute.

The stirrups were down in the dark somewhere below the farthest reach
of Pink’s toes–he never once located them. But Pink was not known all
over Northern Montana as a “bronco-peeler” for nothing. He surprised
Glory even more than that deceitful bit of horseflesh had surprised
Pink. While his quirt swung methodically, he looked often over his
shoulder for the posse, and wondered that it did not appear.

The posse, however, was at that moment having troubles of its own.
Happy Jack, not having a night horse saddled, had borrowed one not
remarkable for its sure-footedness. No sooner had they sighted their
quarry than Jack’s horse stepped in a hole and went head-long–which
was bad enough. When he got up he planted a foot hastily on Jack’s
diaphragm and then bolted straight for the peacefully slumbering
herd–which was worse.

With stirrup-straps snapping like pistol-shots, he tore down through
the dreaming cattle, with none to stop him or say him nay. The herd
did not wait for explanations; as the posse afterward said, it quit the
earth, while they gathered around the fallen Jack and tried to discover
if it was a doctor or coroner that was needed.

When Jack came up sputtering sand and profane words, there was no herd,
no horse and no Pink anywhere in that portion of Chouteau County.
Weary came back, laughing at the joke and fully expecting to see Pink a
prisoner. When he saw how things stood, he said “Mamma mine!” and
headed for camp on a run. The others deployed to search the range for
a beef-herd, strayed, and with no tag for its prompt delivery.

Weary crept into the bed-tent and got Chip by the shoulder. Chip sat
up, instantly wide-awake. “What’s the matter?” he demanded sharply.

“Chip, we–we’ve lost Cadwolloper!” Weary’s voice was tragic.

“Hell!” snapped Chip, lying down again. “Don’t let that worry yuh.”

“And we’ve lost the herd, too,” added Weary mildly.

Chip got up and stayed up, and some of his remarks, Weary afterward
reported, were scandalous.

There was another scene at sunrise that the Happy Family voted
scandalous–and that was when they rode into a little coulee and came
upon the herd, quietly grazing, and Pink holding them, with each blue
eye a volcano shooting wrath.

“Yuh knock-kneed bunch uh locoed sheep-herders!” he greeted spitefully,
“if yuh think yuh can saw off on your foolery and hold this herd, I’ll
go and get something to eat. When I come to this outfit t’ work, I
naturally s’posed yuh was cow-punchers. Yuh ain’t. Yuh couldn’t hold
a bunch uh sick lambs inside a high board corral with the gate shut and
locked on the outside. When it comes t’ cow-science, you’re the limit.
Yuh couldn’t earn your board on a ten-acre farm in Maine, driving one
milk-cow and a yearling calf t’ pasture and back. You’re a hot bunch
uh rannies–I don’t think! Up on Milk River they’d put bells on every
dam’ one uh yuh t’ keep yuh from getting lost going from the mess-house
t’ the corral and back. And, Mr. Weary, next time yuh give a man a
horse t’ fall off from, for the Lord’s sake don’t put him on a gentle
old skate that would be pickings for a two-year-old kid. I thought
this here Glory’d give a man something to do, from all the yawping I’ve
heard done about him. I heard uh him when I was on the Cross L; and I
will say right now that he’s the biggest disappointment I’ve met up
with in many a long day. He’s punk. Come and get him and let me have
something alive. I’m weary uh trying to delude myself into thinking
that this red image is a horse.”

The Happy Family, huddled ten paces before him, stared. Pink slid out
of the saddle and came forward, smiling, and dimpling. He held out a
gloved hand to the first man he came to, which was Weary himself. “Are
yuh happy to meet Milk River Pink?” he wanted to know.

The Happy Family, grinning sheepishly, crowded close to shake him by
the hand.

Happy Jack, coming from Dry Lake where he had been sent for the mail,
rode up to the Flying U camp just at dinner time and dismounted
gloomily and in silence. His horse looked fagged–which was unusual in
Happy’s mounts unless there was urgent need of haste or he was out with
the rest of the Family and constrained to adopt their pace, which was
rapid. Happy, when riding alone, loved best to hump forward over the
horn and jog along slowly, half asleep.

“Something’s hurting Happy,” was Cal Emmett’s verdict when he saw the
condition of the horse.

“He’s got a burden on his mind as big as a haystack,” grinned Jack
Bates. “Watch the way his jaw hangs down, will yuh? Bet yuh
somebody’s dead.”

“Most likely it’s something he thinks is going to happen,” said Pink.
“Happy always makes me think of a play I seen when I was back home; it
starts out with a melancholy cuss coming out and giving a sigh that
near lifts him off his feet, and he says: ‘In soo-ooth I know not
why I am so sa-ad.’ That’s Happy all over.”

The Happy Family giggled and went on with their dinner, for Happy Jack
was too close for further comments not intended for his ears. They
waited demurely, but in secret mirth, for him to unburden his mind.
They knew that they would not have long to wait; Happy, bird of ill
omen that he was, enjoyed much the telling of bad news.

“Weary’s in town,” he announced heavily, coming over and getting
himself a plate and cup.

The Happy Family were secretly a bit disappointed; this promised, after
all, to be tame.

“Did he bring the horses?” asked Chip, glancing up over the brim of his
cup.

“I dunno,” Happy responded from the stove, where he was trying how much
of everything he could possibly pile upon his plate without spilling
anything. “I didn’t see no horses–but the one he was ridin’.”

Weary had been sent, two weeks ago, to the upper Marias country after
three saddle horses that had strayed from the home range, and which had
been seen near Shelby. It was quite time for him to return, if he
expected to catch the Flying U wagon before it pulled out on the beef
roundup. That he should be in town and not ride out with Happy Jack
was a bit strange.

“Why don’t yuh throw it out uh yuh, yuh big, long-jawed croaker?”
demanded Pink in a voice queerly soft and girlish. It had been a real
grievance to him that he had not been permitted to go with Weary, who
was his particular chum. “What’s the matter? Is Weary sick?”

“No,” said Happy Jack deliberately, “I guess he ain’t what yuh could
call sick.”

“Why didn’t he come out with you, then?” asked Chip, sharply. Happy
did get on one’s nerves so.

“Well, I ast him t’ come–and he took a shot at me for it.”

There was an instant’s dead silence. Then Jack Bates laughed uneasily.

“Happy, how many horses did yuh ride out to camp?”

Happy Jack had, upon one occasion, looked too long upon the wine–or
whisky, to be more explicit. Afterward, he had insisted that he was
riding two horses home, instead of one. He was not permitted to forget
that defection. The Happy Family had an unpleasant habit of recalling
the incident whenever Happy Jack made a statement which they felt
disinclined to credit–as this last statement was.

Happy Jack whirled on the speaker. “Aw, shut up! I never kidnaped no
girl off’n no train, and–”

Jack Bates colored and got belligerently to his feet. That hit him in
an exceedingly tender place.

“Happy, look here,” Chip cut in authoritatively. “What’s wrong with
Weary? If he took a shot at you, it’s a cinch he had some reason for
it.”

Weary was even dearer to the heart of Chip than to Pink.

“Ah–he never! He’s takin’ shots permisc’us, lemme tell yuh. And he
ain’t troublin’ about no reason fer what he’s doin’. He’s plumb
oary-eyed–that’s what. He’s on a limb that beats any I ever seen.
He’s drunk–drunk as a boiled owl, and he don’t give a damn. He’s lost
his hat, and he’s swapped cayuses with somebody–a measly old
bench–and he’s shootin’ up the town t’ beat hell!”

The Happy Family looked at one another dazedly. Weary drunk? Weary?
It was unbelieveable. Such a thing had never been heard of before in
the history of the Happy Family. Even Chip, who had known Weary before
either had known the Flying U, could not remember anything of the sort.
The Happy Family were often hilarious; they had even, on certain
occasions, shot up the town; but they had done it as a family and they
had done it sober. It was an unwritten law among the Flying U boys,
that all riotous conduct should occur when they were together and when
the Family could, as a unit, assume the consequences–if consequences
there were to be.

“I guess Happy must a rode the whole blame saddle-bunch home, this
time,” Cal remarked, with stinging sarcasm.

“Ah, yuh can go and see fer yourselves; yuh don’t need t’ take my
word fer nothing” cried Happy Jack, much grieved that they should doubt
him. “I hain’t had but one drink t’day–and that wasn’t nothin’ but
beer. It’s straight goods: Weary’s as full as he can git and top a
horse. He’s sure enjoyin’ himself, too. Dry Lake is all hisn–and the
way he’s misusin’ the rights uh ownership is plumb scand’l'us. He
makes me think of a cow on the fight in a forty-foot corral; nobody
dast show their noses outside; Dry Lake’s holed up in their sullers,
till he quits camp.

“I seen him cut down on the hotel China-cook jest for tryin’ t’ make a
sneak out t’ the ice-house after some meat fer dinner. He like t’ got
him, too. Chink dodged behind the board-pile in the back yard, an’
laid down. He was still there when I left town, and the chances is
somebody else ‘ll have t’ cook dinner t’day. Weary was so busy
close-herdin’ the Chinaman that I got a chanst t’ sneak out the back
door uh Rusty’s place, climb on m’ horse and take a shoot up around by
the stockyards and pull fer camp. I couldn’t git t’ the store, so I
didn’t bring out no mail.”

The Happy Family drew a long breath. This was getting beyond a joke.

“Looks t ‘me like you fellows ‘d come alive and do something about it,”
hinted Happy, with his mouth full. “Weary’ll shoot somebody, er git
shot, if he ain’t took care of mighty quick.”

“Happy,” said Chip bluntly, “I don’t grab that yarn. Weary may be in
town, and he may be having a little fun with Dry Lake, but he isn’t
drunk. When you try to run a whizzer like that, you can put me down as
being from Missouri.”

“Same here,” put in Pink, ominously soft as to voice. “Anybody that
tries to make me believe Weary’s performing that way has sure got his
work cut out for him. If it was Happy, now–”

“Gee!” cried Jack Bates, laughing as a possible solution came to him.
“I’m willing to bet money he was just stringing Happy. I’ll bet he
done it deliberate and with malice aforethought, just to make Happy
sneak out uh town and burn the earth getting here so he could tell it
scarey to the rest of us.”

“Yeah, that’s about the size of it,” assented Cal.

The Family felt that they had a new one on Happy Jack, and showed it in
the smiles they sent toward him.

“By golly, yes!” broke out Slim. “Weary’s been layin’ for Happy for a
long while to pay off making the tent leak on him, that night; he’s
sure played a good one, this time!”

Happy carefully balanced his plate on the wagon-tongue near the
doubletrees, and stood glaring down upon his tormentors.

“Aw, look here!” he began, with his voice very near to tears. Then he
gulped and took a more warlike tone. “I don’t set m’self up t’ be a
know-it-all–but I guess I can tell when a man’s full uh booze. And I
ain’t claimin’ t’ be no Jiujitsu sharp” (with a meaning glance at Pink)
“and I know the chances I’m takin’ when I stand up agin the bunch–but
I’m ready, here and now, t’ fight any damn man that says I’m a liar, er
that Weary was jest throwin’ a load into me. Two or three uh yuh have
licked me mor’n once–but that’s all right. I’m willing t’ back up
anything I’ve said, and yuh can wade right in a soon as you’re a mind
to.

“I don’t back down a darn inch. Weary’s in Dry Lake. He is drunk.
And he is shootin’ up the town. If yuh don’t want t’ believe it, I
guess they’s no law t’ make yuh–but if yuh got any sense, and are any
friends uh Weary’s, yuh’ll mosey in and fetch him out here if yuh have
t’ bring him the way he brung ole Dock that time Patsy took cramps. Go
on in and see fer yourselves, darn yuh! But don’t go shootin’ off your
faces to me till yuh got a license to.”

This, if unassuring, was convincing. The Happy Family stopped smiling,
and looked at one another uncertainly.

“I guess two or three of you better ride in and see what there is to
it,” announced Chip, dryly. “If Happy is romancing–” His look was
eloquent.

But Happy Jack, though he stood a good deal in awe of Chip and his
sarcasm, never flinched. He looked him straight in the eye and
maintained the calm of conscious innocence.

“I’ll go,” said Pink, getting up and throwing his plate and cup into
the dishpan. “Mind yuh, I don’t believe a word of it; Happy, if this
is just a sell, so help me Josephine, you’ll learn some brand new
Jiujitsu right away quick.”

“I’ll go along too,” Happy boldly retorted, “so if yuh want anything uh
me, after you’ve saw Weary, yuh won’t need t’ wait till yuh strike
camp t’ git it. Weary loadin’ me, was he? Yuh’ll find out, all uh
yuh, that it’s him that’s loaded.”

They caught fresh horses and started–Cal, Pink, Jack Bates and Happy
Jack. And Happy stood their jeers throughout the ten-mile ride with an
equanimity that was new to them. For the most part he rode in silence,
and grinned knowingly when they laughed too loudly at the joke Weary
was playing.

“All right–maybe he is,” he flung back, once. “But he sure looks the
part well enough t’ keep all Dry Lake indoors–and I never knowed Weary
t’ terrorize a hull town before. And where’d he git that horse? and
where’s Glory at? and why ain’t he comin’ on t’ camp t’ help you chumps
giggle? Ain’t he had plenty uh time t’ foller me out and enjoy his
little joke? And another thing, he was hard at it when I struck town.
Now, where’d yuh get off at?”

To this argument they offered several explanations–at all of which
Happy grunted in great disdain.

They clattered nonchalantly into Dry Lake, still unconvinced and still
jeering at Happy Jack. The town was very quiet, even for Dry Lake. As
they rounded the blacksmith shop, from where they could see the whole
length of the one street which the place boasted, a yell, shrill,
exultant, familiar, greeted them. A long-legged figure they knew well
dashed down the street to them, a waving six-shooter in one hand, the
reins held aloft in the other. His horse gave evidence of hard usage,
and it was a horse none of them had ever seen before.

“It’s him, all right,” Jack Bates admitted reluctantly.

“Yip! Cowboys in town!” rang the slogan of the range land. “Come
on and–wake ‘em up! OO-oop-ee!” He pulled up so suddenly that
his horse almost sat down in the dust, and reined in beside Pink.

They eyed him in amaze, and avoided meeting one another’s eyes. Truly,
he was a strange-looking Weary. His head was bare and disheveled, his
eyes bloodshot and glaring, his cheeks flushed hotly. His
neck-kerchief covered his chest like a bib and he wore no coat; one
shirtsleeve was rent from shoulder to cuff, telling eloquently that
violent hands had sought to lay hold on him. His long legs, clad in
Angora chaps, swung limp to the stirrup. By all these signs and
tokens, they knew that he was drunk—joyously, unequivocally,
vociferously drunk!

Joe Meeker peered cautiously out of the window of Rusty Brown’s place
when they rode up, and Cal Emmett swore aloud at sight of him. Joe
Meeker was the most indefatigable male gossip for fifty miles around,
and the story of Weary’s spree would spread far and fast. Worse, it
would reach first of all the ears of Weary’s School-ma’am, who lived at
Meeker’s.

Cal started to get down; he wanted to go in and reason with Joe Meeker.
At all events, Ruby Satterlee must not hear of Weary’s defection. It
was all right, maybe, for some men to make fools of themselves in this
fashion; some women would look upon it with lenience. But this was
different; Weary was different, and so was Ruby Satterlee. Cal
meditated upon just what would the most effectually close the mouth of
Joe Meeker.

But Weary spied him as his foot touched the ground. “Oh, yuh can’t
sneak off like that, old-timer. Yuh stay right outside and help wake
‘em up!” he shouted hoarsely.

Cal turned and looked at him keenly; looked also at the erratic
movements of the gun, and reconsidered his decision. Joe Meeker could
wait.

“Better come on out to camp, Weary,” he said persuasively. “We’re all
of us going, right away. Yuh can ride out with us.”

Weary had not yet extracted all the joy there was in the situation. He
did not want to ride out to camp; more, he had no intention of doing
so. He stood up in the stirrups and declaimed loudly his views upon
the subject, and his opinion of any man who proposed such a move, and
punctuated his remarks freely with profanity and bullets.

Under cover of Weary’s elocution Pink did a bit of jockeying and got
his horse sidling up against Cal. He leaned carelessly upon the
saddle-horn and fixed his big, innocent eyes upon Weary’s flushed face.

“He’s pretty cute, if he is full,” he murmured discreetly to Cal. “He
won’t let his gun get empty–see? Loads after every third shot,
regular. We’ve got to get him so excited he forgets that little
ceremony. Once his gun’s empty, he’s all to the bad–we can take him
into camp. We’ll try and rush him out uh town anyway, and shoot as we
go. It’s our only show–unless we can get him inside and lay him out.”

“Yeah, that’s what we’ll have to do,” Cal assented guardedly. “He’s
sure tearing it off in large chunks, ain’t he? I never knew–”

“Here! What you two gazabos making medicine about?” cried Weary
suspiciously. “Break away, there. I won’t stand for no side-talks–”

“We’re just wondering if we hadn’t all better adjourn and have
something to drink,” said Pink musically, straightening up in the
saddle. “Come on–I’m almighty dry.”

“Same here,” said Jack Bates promptly taking the cue, and threw one leg
over the cantle. He got no further than that.

“You stay right up on your old bench!” Weary commanded threateningly.
“We’re the kings uh the prairie, and we’ll drink on our thrones. That
so-many-kinds-of-bar-slave can pack out the dope to us. It’s what he’s
there for.”

That settled Pink’s little plan to get him inside where, lined up to
the bar, they might–if they were quick enough–get his gun away from
him; or, failing that, the warm room and another drink or two would
“lay him out” and render him harmless.

Weary, shoving three cartridges dexterously into the chambers in place
of those just emptied, shouted to Rusty to bring out the “sheepdip.”
The four drew together and attempted further consultation, separated
hastily when his eye fell upon them, and waited meekly his further
pleasure. They knew better than to rouse his anger against them.

Weary, displeased because Rusty did not immediately respond to his
call, sent a shot or two through the window by way of hurrying him.

Whereupon Rusty cautiously opened the door, shoved a tray with bottle
and glasses ostentatiously out into the sunlight for a peace offering,
and finding that hostilities ceased, came forth in much fear and served
them.

They drank solemnly.

“Take another one, darn yuh,” commanded Weary.

They drank again, more solemnly.

The sun beat harshly down upon the deserted street, and upon the bare,
tousled, brown head of Weary. The four stared at him uneasily; they
had never seen him like this before, and it gave him an odd, unfamiliar
air that worried them more than they would have cared to own.

Only Pink refused to lose heart. “Well, come on–let’s wake up these
dead ones,” he shouted, drawing his gun and firing into the air. “Get
busy, you sleepers! Yip! Cowboys in town!” He wheeled and darted
off down the street, shooting and yelling, and the others, with Weary
in their midst, followed. At the blacksmith shop, Pink, tacitly the
leader of the rescuers, would have gone straight on out of town. But
Weary whirled and galloped back, firing merrily into the air. A bit
chagrined, Pink wheeled and galloped at his heels, fuming inwardly at
the methodical reloading after every third shot. Cal, on the other
side, glanced across at Pink, shook his head ruefully and shoved more
shells into his smoking gun.

Back and forth from the store at one end of the street to the
blacksmith shop at the other they rode, yelling till their throats
ached and shooting till their gun-barrels were hot; and Weary kept pace
with them and out-yelled and out-shot the most energetic, and never
once forgot the little ceremony of shoving in fresh shells after the
third shot. Drunk, Weary appeared much more cautious than when sober.
Pink grew hot and hoarse, and counted the shots, one, two, three, over
and over till his brain grew sick.

On the seventh trip down the street, a sleek, black head appeared for
an instant over the top of the board-pile in the hotel yard. A pair of
frightened, slant eyes peered out at them. Weary, just about to
reload, caught sight of him and gave a whoop of pure joy.

“Lord, how I do hate a Chink!” he cried, and dropped to the ground the
three shells in his hand that he might fire the two in his gun.

Pink yelled also. “Nab him, Cal!” and caught his gun arm the instant
Weary’s last bullet left the barrel.

Cal leaned and caught Weary round the neck in a close hug. Jack Bates
and Happy Jack crowded close, eager to help but finding no place to
take hold.

“Now, you blame fool, come along home and quit disgracing the whole
community!” cried Cal, half angrily. “Ain’t yuh got any sense at all?”

Weary protested; he swore; he threatened. He was not in the least like
his old, sweet-tempered self. He mourned openly because he had no
longer a gun that he might slay and spare not. He insisted that he
would take much pleasure in killing them all off–especially Pink. He
felt that Pink was the greatest traitor in the lot, and said that it
would be a special joy to him to see Pink expire slowly and in great
pain. He remarked that they would be sorry, before they were through
with him, and repeated, many times, the hint that he never forgot a
friend or forgave an enemy–and looked darkly at Pink.

“You’re batty,” Pink told him sorrowfully, the while they led him out
through the lane. “We’re the best friends yuh got–only yuh don’t
appreciate us.”

Weary glared at him through a tangle of brown hair, and remarked
further, in tones that one could hear a mile, upon the subject of
Pink’s treachery and the particular kind of death he deserved to die.

Pink shrugged his shoulder and grew sulky; then, old friendship growing
strong within him, he sought to soothe him.

But Weary absolutely declined to be soothed. Cal, serene in his
fancied favoritism, attempted the impossible, and was greeted with
language which no man living had ever before heard from the lips of
Weary the sunny. Jack Bates and Happy Jack, profiting by his
experience, wisely kept silence.

For this, the homeward ride was not the companionable gallop it usually
was. They tried to learn from Weary what he had done with Glory, and
whence came the mud-colored cayuse with the dim, blotched brand, that
he bestrode. They asked also where were the horses he had been sent to
bring.

In return, Weary began viciously to dissect their pedigree and general
moral characters.

After that, they gave over trying to question or to reason, and the
last two miles they rode in utter silence. Weary, tiring of venom that
brought no results, subsided gradually into mutterings, and then into
sullen silence, so that, save for his personal appearance, they reached
camp quite decorously.

Chip met them at the bed wagon, where they slipped dispiritedly off
their horses and began to unsaddle–all save Weary; he stared around
him, got cautiously to the ground and walked, with that painfully
circumspect stride sometimes affected by the intoxicated, over to the
cook-tent.

“Well,” snapped Chip to the others, “For once in his life, Happy was
right.”

Weary, still planting his feet primly upon the trampled grass, went
smiling up to the stupefied Patsy.

“Lord, how I do love a big, fat, shiny Dutch cook!” he murmured, and
flung his long arms around him in a hug that caused Patsy to grunt.
“How yuh was, already, Dutchy? Got any pie in this man’s cow-camp?”

Patsy scowled and drew haughtily away from his embrace; there was one
thing he would not endure, even from Weary: it was having his
nationality too lightly mentioned. To call him Dutchy was a direct
insult, and the Happy Family never did it to his face–unless the
provocation was very great. To call him Dutchy and in the same breath
to ask for pie–that, indeed, went far beyond the limits of decency.

“Py cosh, you not ged any pie, Weary Davidson. Py cosh, I learns you
not to call names py sober peoples. You not get no grub whiles you iss
too drunk to be decend mit folks.”

“Hey? Yuh won’t feed a man when he’s hungry? Yuh darn Dutch–” Weary
went into details in a way that was surprising.

The Happy Family rushed up and pulled him off Patsy before he had done
any real harm, and held him till the cook had got into the shelter of
his tent and armed himself with a frying pan. Weary was certainly
outdoing himself today. The Happy Family resolved into a peace
committee.

“Aw, dig up some pie for him, Patsy,” pleaded Cal. “Yuh don’t want to
mind anything he says while he’s like this; yuh know Weary’s a good
friend to yuh when he’s sober. Get some strong coffee–that’ll
straighten him out.”

“Py cosh, I not feed no drunk fools. I not care if it iss Weary. He
hit mine jaw–”

“Aw, gwan! I guess yuh never get that way yourself,” put in Happy
Jack, ponderously sarcastic. “I guess yuh never tanked up in roundup,
one time, and left me cook chuck fer the hull outfit–and I guess Weary
never rode all night, and had the dickens of a time, tryin’ t’ get yuh
a doctor–yuh old heathen. Yuh sure are an ungrateful cuss.”

“Give him some good, hot coffee, Patsy, and anything he wants to eat,”
commanded Chip, more sharply than was his habit. “And don’t be all day
about it, either.”

That settled it, of course; Chip, being foreman, was to be
obeyed–unless Patsy would rather roll his blankets and hunt a new job.
He took to muttering weird German sentences the while he brought out
two pies and poured black coffee into a cup. The reveler drank the
coffee–three cups of it–ate a whole blueberry pie, and was consoled.
He even wanted to embrace Patsy again, but was restrained by the
others. After that he went over and laid down in the shade of the
bed-wagon, and straightway began to snore with much energy and
enthusiasm.

Chip watched him a minute and then went and sat down on the shady side
of the bed-tent and began gloomily to roll a cigarette. The rest of
the Happy Family silently followed his example; for a long while no one
said a word.

It certainly was a shock to see Weary like that. Not because it is
unusual for a man of the range to get in that condition–for on the
contrary, it is rather commonplace. And the Happy Family had lived the
life too long to judge a man harshly because of an occasional
indiscreet departure from the path virtuous; they knew that the man
might be a good fellow, after all. In the West grows Charity sturdily,
with branches quite broad enough to cover certain defections on the
part of such men as Weary Davidson.

For that, the real shock came in the utter unexpectedness of the
thing–and from the fact that a man, even though prone to indulge in
such riotous conduct, is supposed to forswear such indulgence when he
has other and more important things to do. Weary had been sent afar on
a matter of business; he had ridden Glory, a horse belonging to the
Flying U. His arrival without the strays he had been sent after;
without even the horse he had ridden away–that was the real disaster.
He had broken a trust; he had, apparently, appropriated a horse that
did not belong to him, which was worse. But the Happy Family were
loyal, to a man. They did not condemn him; they were only waiting for
him to sleep himself into a condition to explain the mystery.

“Somebody’s doped him,” said Pink with decision, after three hours of
shying around the subject. “You’ll see; somebody’s doped him and
likely took Glory away when they’d got him batty enough not to know the
difference. Yuh mind the queer look in his eyes? And he acts queer.
So help me Josephine! I’d sure like to get next to the man that traded
horses with him.”

The Happy Family breathed deeply; they were all, apparently, thinking
the same thing.

“By golly, that’s what,” spoke Slim, with decision. “He does act like
a man that had been doped.”

“Whisky straight wouldn’t make that much difference in a man,” averred
Jack Bates. “Yuh can’t get Weary on the fight, hardly, when he’s
sober; and look at the way he was in town–hot to slaughter that
Chinaman that wasn’t doing a thing to him, and saying how he hated
Chinks. Weary don’t; he always says, when Patsy don’t make enough pie
to go round, that if he was running the outfit he’d have a Chink to
cook.”

“Aw, look at the way he acted t’ Rusty–and he thinks a lot uh Rusty,
too,” put in Happy Jack, who felt the importance of discovery and was
in an unusually complacent mood. “And he was going t’ hang Pink up by
the heels and–”

Pink turned round and looked at him fixedly, and Happy Jack became
suddenly interested in his cigarette.

“Say, he’ll sure be sore when he comes to himself, though,” observed
Cal. “I don’t know how he’s going to square himself with his
school-ma’am. Joe Meeker was into Rusty’s place while the big setting
comes off; I would uh given him a gentle hint about keeping his face
closed, only Weary wouldn’t let me off my horse. Joe’ll sure give a
high-colored picture uh the performance.”

“Well, if he does, he’ll regret it a lot,” prophesied Pink. “And
anyway, something sure got wrong with Weary; do yuh suppose he’d give
up Glory deliberately? Not on your life! Glory comes next to the
Schoolma’am in his affections.”

“Wonder where he got that dirt-colored cayuse, anyhow,” mused Cal.

“I was studying out the brand, a while ago,” Pink answered. “It’s
blotched pretty bad, but I made it out. It’s the Rocking R–they range
down along Milk River, next to the reservation. I’ve never had
anything to do with the outfit, but I’d gamble on the brand, all right.”

“Well, how the deuce would he come by a Rocking R horse? He never got
it around here, anywheres. He must uh got it up on the Marias.”

“Then that must be a good long jag he’s had–which I don’t believe,”
interjected Cal.

“Somebody,” said Pink meaningly, “ought to have gone along with him;
this thing wouldn’t uh happened, then.”

“Ye-e-s?” Chip felt that the remark applied to him as a foreman,
rather than as one of the Family, and he resented it. “If I’d sent
somebody else with him, the outfit would probably be out two horses,
instead of one–and there’d be two men under the bed-wagon with their
hats and coats missing.”

Pink’s eyes, under their heavy fringe of curled lashes, turned
ominously purple. “With all due respect to you, Mr. Bennett, I’d like
to have you explain–”

A horseman rode quietly up to them from behind a thicket of
choke-cherry bushes. Pink, catching sight of him first, stopped short
off and stared.

“Hello, boys,” greeted the new-comer gaily. “How’s everything? Mamma!
it’s good to get amongst white folks again.”

The Happy Family rose up as one man and stared fixedly; not one of them
spoke, or moved. Pink was the first to recover.

“Well–I’ll be–damned!”

“Yuh sure will, Cadwolloper, if yuh don’t let down them pretty lashes
and quit gawping. What the dickens ails you fellows, anyhow? Is–is
my hat on crooked, or–or anything?”

“Weary, by all that’s good!” murmured Chip, dazedly.

Weary swung a long leg over the back of Glory and came to earth.
“Say,” he began in the sunny, drawly voice that was good to hear,
“what’s the joke?”

The Happy Family sat down again and looked queerly at one another.

Happy Jack glanced furtively at a long figure in the grass near by, and
then, unhappily, at Weary.

“It’s him, all right,” he blurted solemnly. “They’re both him!”

The Happy Family snickered hysterically.

Weary took a long step and confronted Happy Jack. “I’m both him, am
I?” he repeated mockingly. “Mamma, but you’re a lucid cuss!” He
turned and regarded the stunned Family judicially.

“If there’s any of it left,” he hinted sweetly, “I wouldn’t mind taking
a jolt myself; but from the looks, and the actions, yuh must have got
away with at least two gallons!”

“Oh, we can give you a jolt, I guess,” Chip retorted dryly. “Just step
this way.”

Weary, wondering a bit at the tone of him, followed; at his heels came
the perturbed Happy Family. Chip stooped and turned the sleeping one
over on his back; the sleeper opened his eyes and blinked questioningly
up at the huddle of bent faces.

The astonished, blue eyes of Weary met the quizzical blue eyes of his
other self. He leaned against the wagon wheel.

“Oh, mamma!” he said, weakly.

His other self sat up and looked around, felt for his hat, saw that it
was gone, and reached mechanically for his cigarette material.

“By the Lord! Are punchers so damn scarce in this neck uh the woods,
that yuh’ve got to shanghai a man in order to make a full crew?” he
demanded of the Happy Family, in the voice of Weary–minus the drawl.
“I’ve got a string uh cayuses in that darn stockyards, back in
town–and a damn poor town it is!–and I’ve also got a date with the
Circle roundup for tomorrow night. What yuh going to do about it?
Speak up, for I’m in a hurry to know.”

The Happy Family looked at one another and said nothing.

“Say,” began Weary, mildly. “Did yuh say your name was Ira Mallory,
and do yuh mind how they used to mix us up in school, when we were both
kids? ‘Cause I’ve got a hunch you’re the same irrepressible that has
the honor to be my cousin.”

“I didn’t say it,” retorted his other self, pugnaciously. “But I don’t
know as it’s worth while denying it. If you’re Will Davidson, shake.
What the devil d’yuh want to look so much like me, for? Ain’t yuh got
any manners? Yuh always was imitating your betters.” He grinned and
got slowly to his feet. “Boys, I don’t know yuh, but I’ve a hazy
recollection that we had one hell of a time shooting up that little
townerine, back there. I don’t go on a limb very often, but when I do,
folks are apt to find it out right away.”

The Happy Family laughed.

“By golly,” said Slim slowly, “that cousin story ’s all right–but I
bet yuh you two fellows are twins, at the very least!”

“Guess again, Slim,” cried Weary, already in the clutch of old times.
“Run away and play, you kids. Irish and me have got steen things to
talk about, and mustn’t be bothered.”

Cal Emmett straightened up with his gloved hand pressed tight against
the small of his back, sighed “Hully Gee!” at the ache of his muscles
and went over to the water bucket and poured a quart or so of cool,
spring water down his parched throat. The sun blazed like a furnace
with the blower on, though it was well over towards the west; the air
was full of smoke, dust and strong animal odors, and the throaty
bawling of many cattle close-held. For it was nearing the end of
spring round-up, and many calves were learning, with great physical
and mental distress, the feel of a hot iron properly applied. Cal
shouted to the horse-wrangler that the well had gone dry–meaning the
bucket–and went back to work.

“I betche we won’t git through in time for no picnic,” predicted
Happy Jack gloomily, getting the proper hold on the hind leg of a
three-months-old calf. “They’s three hundred to decorate yet, if
they’s one; and it’ll rain–”

“You’re batty,” Cal interrupted. “Uh course we’ll get through–we’ve
got to; what d’yuh suppose we’ve been tearing the bone out for the
last three weeks for?”

Chip, with a foot braced against the calf’s shoulder, ran a U on its
ribs with artistic precision. Chip’s Flying U’s were the pride of
the whole outfit; the Happy Family was willing at any time, to bet
all you dare that Chip’s brands never varied a quarter-inch in
height, width or position. The Old Man and Shorty had been content
to use a stamp, as prescribed by law; but Chip Bennett scorned so
mechanical a device and went on imperturbably defying the law with
his running iron–and the Happy Family gloated over his independence
and declared that they would sure deal a bunch of misery to the man
that reported him. His Flying U’s were better than a stamp, anyhow,
they said, and it was a treat to watch the way he slid them on, just
where they’d do the most good.

“I’m going home, after supper,” he said, giving just the proper width
to the last curve of the two-hundredth U he had made that afternoon.
“I promised Dell I’d try and get home to-night, and drive over to the
picnic early to-morrow. She’s head push on the grub-pile, I believe,
and wants to make sure there’s enough to go around. There’s about
two hundred and fifty calves left. If you can’t finish up to-night,
it’ll be your funeral.”

“Well, I betche it’ll rain before we git through–it always does,
when you don’t want it to,” gloomed Happy, seizing another calf.

“If it does,” called Weary, who was branding–with a stamp–not far
away, “if it does, Happy, we’ll pack the bossies into the cook-tent
and make Patsy heat the irons in the stove. Don’t yuh cry, little
boy–we’ll sure manage somehow.”

“Aw yes–you wouldn’t see nothing to worry about, not if yuh was
being paid for it. They’s a storm coming–any fool can see that; and
she’s sure going to come down in large chunks. We ain’t got this
amatoor hell for nothing! Yuh won’t want to do no branding in the
cook-tent, nor no place else. I betche–”

“Please,” spoke up Pink, coiling afresh the rope thrown off a calf he
had just dragged up to Cal and Happy Jack, “won’t somebody lend me a
handkerchief? I want to gag Happy; he’s working his hoodoo on us
again.”

Happy Jack leered up at him, consciously immune–for there was no
time for strife of a physical nature, and Happy knew it. Everyone
was working his fastest.

“Hoodoo nothing! I guess maybe yuh can’t see that bank uh
thunderheads. I guess your sight’s poor, straining your eyes towards
the Fourth uh July ever since Christmas. If yuh think yuh can come
Christian Science act on a storm, and bluff it down jest by sayin’ it
ain’t there, you’re away off. I ain’t that big a fool; I–” he
trailed into profane words, for the calf he was at that minute
holding showed a strong inclination to plant a foot in Happy’s
stomach.

Cal Emmett glanced over his shoulder, grunted a comprehensive
refutation of Happy Jack’s fears and turned his whole attention to
work. The branding proceeded steadily, with the hurry of skill that
makes each motion count something done; for though not a man of them
except Happy Jack would have admitted it, the Happy Family was
anxious. With two hundred and fifty calves to be branded in the open
before night, on the third day of July; with a blistering sun sapping
the strength of them and a storm creeping blackly out of the
southwest; with a picnic tugging their desires and twenty-five long
prairie miles between them and the place appointed, one can scarce
wonder that even Pink and Weary–born optimists, both of them–eyed
the west anxiously when they thought no one observed them. Under
such circumstances, Happy Jack’s pessimism came near being
unbearable; what the Happy Family needed most was encouragement.

The smoke hung thicker in the parched air and stung more sharply
their bloodshot, aching eyeballs. The dust settled smotheringly upon
them, filled nostrils and lungs and roughened their patience into
peevishness. A calf bolted from the herd, and a “hold-up” man
pursued it vindictively, swearing by several things that he would
break its blamed neck–only his wording was more vehement. A cinder
got in Slim’s eye and one would think, from his language, that such a
thing was absolutely beyond the limit of man’s endurance, and a blot
upon civilization. Even Weary, the sweet-tempered, grew irritable
and heaped maledictions on the head of the horse-wrangler because he
was slow about bringing a fresh supply of water. Taken altogether,
the Happy Family was not in its sunniest mood.

When Patsy shouted that supper was ready, they left their work
reluctantly and tarried just long enough to swallow what food was
nearest. For the branding was not yet finished, and the storm
threatened more malignantly.

Chip saddled Silver, his own particular “drifter,” eyed the clouds
appraisingly and swung into the saddle for a fifteen-mile ride to the
home ranch and his wife, the Little Doctor. “You can make it, all
right, if yuh half try,” he encouraged. “It isn’t going to cut loose
before dark, if I know the signs. Better put your jaw in a sling,
Happy–you’re liable to step on it. Cheer up! to-morrow’s the Day we
Celebrate in letters a foot high. Come early and stay late, and
bring your appetites along. Fare-you-well, my brothers.” He rode
away in the long lope that eats up the miles with an ease astonishing
to alien eyes, and the Happy Family rolled a cigarette apiece and
went back to work rather more cheerful than they had been.

Pleasure, the pleasure of wearing good clothes, dancing
light-footedly to good music and saying nice things that bring smiles
to the faces of girls in frilly dresses and with brown, wind-tanned
faces and eyes ashine, comes not often to the veterans of the
“Sagebrush Cavalry.” They were wont to count the weeks and the days,
and at last the hours until such pleasure should come to them. They
did not grudge the long circles, short sleeps and sweltering hours at
the branding, which made such pleasures possible–only so they were
not, at the last, cheated of their reward.

Every man of them–save Pink–had secret thoughts of some particular
girl. And more than one girl, no doubt, would be watching, at the
picnic, for a certain lot of white hats and sun-browned faces to
dodge into sight over a hill, and looking for one face among the
group; would be listening for a certain well-known, well-beloved
chorus of shouts borne faintly from a distance–the clear-toned,
care-naught whooping that heralded the coming of Jim Whitmore’s Happy
Family.

To-morrow they would be simply a crowd of clean-hearted, clean-limbed
cowboys, with eyes sunny and untroubled as a child’s, and laughs that
were good to hear and whispered words that were sweet to dream over
until the next meeting. (If you ask the girls of the range-land, and
believe their verdict, cowboys make the very best and most piquant of
lovers.) Tomorrow there would be no hint of the long hours in the
saddle, or the aching muscles and the tired, smarting eyes. They
might, if pressed, own that they burnt the earth getting there, but
the details of that particular conflagration would be far, far behind
them–forgotten; no one could guess, to-morrow, that they were ever
hot or thirsty or tired, or worried over a threatening storm, or that
they ever swore at one another ill-naturedly from the sheer strain of
anxiety and muscle-ache.

By sundown, so great was their industry, the last calf had scampered,
blatting resentment, to seek his mother in the herd. Slim kicked the
embers of the branding fire apart and emptied the water-bucket over
them with a satisfied grunt.

“By golly, I ain’t mourning because brandin’s about over,” he said.
“I’m plumb tired uh the sight uh them blasted calves.”

“And we got through ahead of the storm,” Weary sweetly reminded Happy
Jack.

Happy looked moodily up at the muttering black mass nearly over their
heads and said nothing; Happy never did have anything to say when his
gloomy predictions were brought to naught.

“I’m going to get on the bed-ground without any red tape or argument,
if yuh ask me,” volunteered Cal Emmett, rubbing his aching arms.
“We want to get an early start in the morning.”

“Meaning sun-up, I suppose,” fleered Pink, who had no especial,
feminine reason for looking forward with longing. With Pink, it was
pleasure in the aggregate that lured him; there would be horse racing
after dinner, and a dance in the school-house at night, and a season
of general hilarity over a collection of rockets and Roman candles.
These things appealed more directly to the heart of Pink than did the
feminine element; for he had yet to see the girl who could disturb
the normal serenity of his mind or fill his dreams with visions
beautiful. Also, there was one thing about these girls that did not
please him; they were prone to regard him as a sweet, amusing little
boy whose dimples they might kiss with perfect composure (though of
course they never did). They seemed to be forever taking the “Isn’t
he cunning!” attitude, and refused to regard him seriously, or treat
him with the respect they accorded to the rest of the Happy Family.
Weary’s schoolma’am had offended him deeply, at a dance the winter
before, by patting him indulgently on the shoulder and telling him to
“Run along and find you a partner.” Such things rankled, and he knew
that the girls knew it, and that it amused them very much. Worse,
the Happy Family knew it, and it amused them even more than it amused
the girls. For this reason Pink would much prefer to sleep
luxuriously late and ride over to the picnic barely in time for
dinner and the races afterward. He did not want too long a time with
the girls.

“Sure, we’ll start at sun-up,” Cal answered gravely. “We’ve got to
be there by ten o’clock, so as to help the girls cut the cake and
round up all the ham sandwiches; haven’t we, Weary?”

“I should smile to remark,” Weary assented emphatically. “Sun-up
sure sees us on the road, Cadwolloper–and yuh want to be sure and
wear that new pink silk handkerchief, that matches the roses in your
cheeks so nice. My schoolma’am’s got a friend visiting her, and
she’s been hearing a lot about yuh. She’s plumb wild to meet yuh.
Chip drawed your picture and I sent it over in my last letter, and
the little friend has gone plumb batty over your dimples (Chip drawed
yuh with a sweet smile drifting, like a rose-leaf with the dew on it,
across your countenance, and your hat pushed back so the curls would
show) and it sure done the business for Little Friend. Schoolma’am
says she’s a good-looker, herself, and that Joe Meeker has took to
parting his hair on the dead center and wearing a four-inch,
celluloid collar week days. But he’s all to the bad–she just looks
at your picture and smiles sad and longing.”

“I hate to see a man impose on friendship,” murmured Pink. “I don’t
want to spoil your face till after the Fourth, though that ain’t
saying yuh don’t deserve it. But I will say this: You’re a liar–you
ain’t had a letter for more than six weeks.”

“Got anything yuh want to bet on that?” Weary reached challengingly
toward an inner pocket of his vest.

“Nit. I don’t give a darn, anyway yuh look at it. I’m going to
bed.” Pink unrolled his “sooguns” in their accustomed corner next to
Weary’s bed and went straightway to sleep.

Weary thumped his own battered pillow into some semblance of
plumpness and gazed with suspicion at the thick fringe of curled
lashes lying softly upon Pink’s cheeks.

“If I was a girl,” he said pensively to the others, “I’d sure be in
love with Cadwolloper myself. He don’t amount to nothing, but his
face ‘d cause me to lose my appetite and pine away like a wilted
vi’let. It’s straight, about that girl being stuck on his picture;
I’d gamble she’s counting the hours on her fingers, right now, till
he’ll stand before her. Schoolma’am says it’ll be a plumb sin if he
don’t act pretty about it and let her love him.” He eyed Pink
sharply from the tail of his eye, but not a lash quivered; the breath
came evenly and softly between Pink’s half-closed lips–and if he
heard there was nothing to betray the fact.

Weary sighed and tried again. “And that ain’t the worst of it,
either. Mame Beckman has got an attack; she told Schoolma’am she
could die for Pink and never bat an eye. She said she never knowed
what true love was till she seen him. She says he looks just like
the cherubs–all but the wings–that she’s been working in red thread
on some pillow shams. She was making ‘em for her sister a present,
but she can’t give ‘em up, now; she calls all the cherubs ‘Pink,’ and
kisses ‘em night and morning, regular.” He paused and watched
anxiously Pink’s untroubled face. “I tell yuh, boys, it’s awful to
have the fatal gift uh beauty, like Cadwolloper’s got. He means all
right, but he sure trifles a lot with girls’ affections–which ain’t
right. Mamma! don’t he look sweet, laying there so innocent? I’m
sure sorry for Mame, though.” He eyed him sidelong. But Pink slept
peacefully on, except that, after a half minute, he stirred slightly
and muttered something about “drive that darned cow back.” Then
Weary gave up in despair and went to sleep. When the tent became
silent, save for the heavy breathing of tired men. Pink’s long
lashes lifted a bit, and he grinned maliciously up at the cloth roof.

For obvious reasons he was the only one of the lot who heard with no
misgivings the vicious swoop of the storm; so long as the tent-pegs
held he didn’t care how hard it rained. But the others who woke to
the roar of wind and the crash of thunder and to the swish and beat
of much falling water, turned uneasily in their beds and hoped that
it would not last long. To be late in starting for that particular
scene of merry-making which had held their desires for so long would
be a calamity they could not reflect upon calmly.

At three o’clock Pink, from long habit, opened his eyes to the dull
gray of early morning. The air in the tent was clammy and chill and
filled with the audible breathing of a dozen sleeping men; overhead
the canvas was dull yellow and sodden with the steady drip, drip,
drop of rain. There would be no starting out at sunrise–and perhaps
there would be no starting at all, he thought with lazy
disappointment, and turned on his side for another nap. His glance
fell upon Weary’s up-turned, slumber-blank face, and his memory
reverted revengefully to the baiting of the night before. He would
fix Weary for that, he told himself spitefully; mentally measured a
perpendicular line from Weary’s face to the roof, reached up and drew
his finger firmly down along the canvas for a good ten inches–and if
you don’t know why, try it yourself some time in a tent with the rain
pouring down upon the land. As if that were not enough he repeated
the operation again and again, each time in a fresh place, until the
rain came through beautifully all over the bed of Weary. Then he lay
down, cuddled the blankets up to his ears, closed his eyes and
composed himself to sleep, at peace with his conscience and the
world–and it did not disturb his self-satisfaction when Weary
presently awoke, moved sleepily away from one drip and directly under
another, shifted again, swore a little in an undertone and at last
was forced to take refuge under his tarpaulin. After that Pink went
blissfully off to dreamland.

At four o’clock it still rained dismally–and the Happy Family,
waking unhappily one after another, remembered that this was the
Fourth that they had worked and waited for so long, “swore a prayer
or two and slept again.” At six the sun was shining, and Jack Bates,
first realizing the blessed fact, called the others jubilantly.

Weary sat up and observed darkly that he wished he knew what
son-of-a-gun got the tent to leaking over him, and eyed Pink
suspiciously; but Pink only knuckled his eyes like a sleepy baby and
asked if it rained in the night, and said he had been dead to the
world. Happy Jack came blundering under the ban by asking Weary to
remember that he told him it would rain. As he slept beside Weary,
his guilt was certain and his punishment, Weary promised himself,
would be sure.

Then they went out and faced the clean-washed prairie land, filled
their lungs to the bottom with sweet, wine-like air, and asked one
another why in the dickens the night-hawk wasn’t on hand with the
cavvy, so they could get ready to start.

At nine o’clock, had you wandered that way, you would have seen the
Happy Family–a clean-shaven, holiday-garbed, resplendent Happy
Family–roosting disconsolately wherever was a place clean enough to
sit, looking wistfully away to the skyline.

They should, by now, have been at the picnic, and every man of them
realized the fact keenly. They were ready, but they were afoot; the
nighthawk had not put in an appearance with the saddle bunch, and
there was not a horse in camp that they might go in search of him.
With no herd to hold, they had not deemed it necessary to keep up any
horses, and they were bewailing the fact that they had not forseen
such an emergency–though Happy Jack did assert that he had all along
expected it.

“By golly, I’ll strike out afoot and hunt him up, if he don’t heave
in sight mighty suddent,” threatened Slim passionately, after a long,
dismal silence. “By golly, he’ll wisht I hadn’t, too.”

Cal looked up from studying pensively his patent leathers. “Go on,
Slim, and round him up. This is sure getting hilarious–a fine way
to spend the Fourth!”

“Maybe that festive bunch that held up the Lewistown Bank, day before
yesterday, came along and laid the hawk away on the hillside so they
could help themselves to fresh horses,” hazarded Jack Bates, in the
hope that Happy Jack would seize the opening to prophesy a new
disaster.

“I betche that’s what’s happened, all right,” said Happy, rising to
the bait. “I betche yuh won’t see no horses t’day–ner no
night-hawk, neither.”

The Happy Family looked at one another and grinned.

“Who’ll stir the lemonade and help pass the sandwiches?” asked Pink,
sadly. “Who’ll push, when the school-ma’am wants to swing? Or Len
Adams? or–”

“Oh, saw off!” Weary implored. “We can think up troubles enough,
Cadwolloper, without any help from you.”

“Well, I guess your troubles are about over, cully–I can hear ‘em
coming.” Pink picked up his rope and started for the horse corral as
the belated cavvy came jingling around the nose of the nearest hill.
The Happy Family brightened perceptibly; after all, they could be at
the picnic by noon–if they hurried. Their thoughts flew to the
crowd–and to the girls in frilly dresses–under the pine trees in a
certain canyon just where the Bear Paws reach lazily out to shake
hands with the prairie land.

Up on the high level, with the sun hot against their right cheeks and
a lazy breeze flipping neckerchief ends against their smiling lips,
the world seemed very good, and a jolly place to live in, and there
was no such thing as trouble anywhere. Even Happy Jack was betrayed
into expecting much pleasure and no misfortune, and whistled while he
rode.

Five miles slipped behind them easily–so easily that their horses
perked ears and tugged hard against the bits. The next five were
rougher, for they had left the trail and struck out across a rough
bit of barrenness on a short cut to the ford in Sheep Coulee. All
the little gullies and washouts were swept clean and smooth with the
storm, and the grass roots showed white where the soil had washed
away. They hoped the rain had not reached to the mountains and
spoiled the picnic grounds, and wondered what time the girls would
have dinner ready.

So they rode down the steep trail into Sheep Coulee, galloped a
quarter mile and stopped, amazed, at the ford. The creek was running
bank full; more, it was churning along like a mill-race, yellow with
the clay it carried and necked with great patches of dirty foam.

“I guess here’s where we don’t cross,” said Weary, whistling mild
dismay.

“Now, wouldn’t that jostle yuh?” asked Pink, of no one in particular.

“By golly, the lemonade ‘ll be cold, and so’ll the san’wiches, before
we git there,” put in Slim, with one of his sporadic efforts to be
funny. “We got t’ go back.”

“Back nothing,” chorused five outraged voices. “We’ll hunt some
other crossing.”

“Down the creek a piece–yuh mind where that old sandbar runs half
across? We’ll try that.” Weary’s tone was hopeful, and they turned
and followed him.

Half a mile along the raging little creek they galloped, with no
place where they dared to cross. Then, loping around a
willow-fringed bend, Weary and Pink, who were ahead, drew their
horses back upon their haunches. They had all but run over a huddle
of humanity lying in the fringe of weeds and tall grasses that grew
next the willows.

“What in thunder–” began Cal, pulling up. They slid off their
horses and bent curiously over the figure. Weary turned it
investigatively by a shoulder. The figure stirred, and groaned.
“It’s somebody hurt; take a hand here, and help carry him out where
the sun shines. He’s wet to the skin,” commanded Weary sharply.

When they lifted him he opened his eyes and looked at them; while
they carried him tenderly out from the wet tangle and into the warmth
of the sun, he set his teeth against the groans that would come.
They stood around him uneasily and looked down at him. He was young,
like themselves, and he was a stranger; also, he was dressed like a
cowboy, in chaps, high-heeled boots and silver-mounted spurs. The
chaps were sodden and heavy with water, as was the rest of his
clothing.

“He must uh laid out in all that storm, last night,” observed Cal, in
a subdued voice. “He–”

“Somebody better ride back and have the bed wagon brought up, so we
can haul him to a doctor,” suggested Pink. “He’s hurt.”

The stranger’s eyes swept the faces of the Happy Family anxiously.
“Not on your life,” he protested weakly. “I don’t want any
doctor–in mine, thank yuh. I–it’s no use, anyhow.”

“The hell it ain’t!” Pink was drawing off his coat to make a pillow.
“You’re hurt, somehow, ain’t yuh?”

“I’m–dying,” the other said, laconically. “So yuh needn’t go to any
trouble, on my account. From the looks–yuh was headed for
some–blowout. Go on, and let me be.”

The Happy Family looked at one another incredulously; they were so
likely to ride on!

“I guess you don’t savvy this bunch, old-timer,” said Weary calmly,
speaking for the six. “We’re going to do what we can. If yuh don’t
mind telling us where yuh got hurt–”

The lips of the other curled bitterly. “I was shot,” he said
distinctly, “by the sheriff and his bunch. But I got away. Last
night I tried to cross the creek, and my horse went on down. It was
storming–fierce. I got out, somehow, and crawled into the weeds.
Laying out in the rain–didn’t help me none. It’s–all off.”

“There ought to be something–” began Jack Bates helplessly.

“There is. If yuh’ll just put me away–afterwards–and say
nothing,–I’ll be–mighty grateful.” He was looking at them sharply,
as if a great deal depended upon their answer.

The Happy Family was dazed. The very suddenness of this unlooked-for
glimpse into the somber eyes of Tragedy was unnerving. The world had
seemed such a jolly place; ten minutes ago–five minutes, even, their
greatest fear had been getting to the picnic too late for dinner.
And here was a man at their feet, calmly telling them that he was
about to die, and asking only a hurried burial and a silence after.
Happy Jack swallowed painfully and shifted his feet in the grass.

“Of course, if yuh’d feel better handing me over–”

“That’ll be about enough on that subject,” Pink interrupted with
decision. “Just because yuh happen to be down and out–for the time
being–is no reason why yuh should insult folks. You can take it for
granted we’ll do what we can for yuh; the question is, what? Yuh
needn’ go talking about cashing in–they’s no sense in it. You’ll be
all right.–”

“Huh. You wait and see.” The fellow’s mouth set grimly upon another
groan. “If you was shot through, and stuck to the saddle–and
rode–and then got pummeled–by a creek at flood, and if yuh laid out
in the rain–all night– Hell, boys! Yuh know I’m about all in.
I’m hard to kill, or I’d have been–dead– What I want to know–will
yuh do what I–said? Will yuh bury me–right here–and keep
it–quiet?”

The Happy Family moved uncomfortably. They hated to see him lying
that way, and talking in short, jerky sentences, and looking so
ghastly, and yet so cool–as if dying were quite an everyday affair.

“I don’t see why yuh ask us to do it,” spoke Cal Emmet bluntly.
“What we want to do is get yuh to help. The chances is you could
be–cured. We–”

“Look here.” The fellow raised himself painfully to an elbow, and
fell back again. “I’ve got folks–and they don’t know–about this
scrape. They’re square–and stand at the top–And they don’t–it
would just about– For God sake, boys! Can’t yuh see–how I feel?
Nobody knows–about this. The sheriff didn’t know–they came up on
me in the dusk–and I fought. I wouldn’t be taken–And it’s my first
bad break–because I got in with a bad–lot. They’ll know
something–happened, when they find–my horse. But they’ll
think–it’s just drowning, if they don’t find–me with a bullet or
two– Can’t yuh see?”

The Happy Family looked away across the coulee, and there were eyes
that saw little of the yellow sunlight lying soft on the green
hillside beyond. The world was not a good place; it was a grim,
pitiless place, and–a man was dying, at their very feet.

“But what about the rest oh the bunch?” croaked Happy Jack, true to
his misanthropic nature, but exceeding husky as to voice. “They’ll
likely tell–”

The dying man shook his head eagerly. “They won’t; they’re
both–dead. One was killed–last night. The other when we first
tried–to make a getaway. It–it’s up to you, boys.”

Pink swallowed twice, and knelt beside him; the others remained
standing, grouped like mourners around an open grave.

“Yuh needn’t worry about us,” Pink said softly, “You can count on us,
old boy. If you’re dead sure a doctor–”

“Drop it!” the other broke in harshly. “I don’t want to live. And
if I did, I couldn’t. I ain’t guessing–I know.”

They said little, after that. The wounded man seemed apathetically
waiting for the end, and not inclined to further speech. Since they
had tacitly promised to do as he wished, he lay with eyes half
closed, watching idly the clouds drifting across to the skyline,
hardly moving.

The Happy Family sat listlessly around on convenient rocks, and
watched the clouds also, and the yellow patches of foam racing down
the muddy creek. Very quiet they were–so quiet that little, brown
birds hopped close, and sang from swaying weeds almost within reach
of them. The Happy Family listened dully to the songs, and waited.
They did not even think to make a cigarette.

The sun climbed higher and shone hotly down upon them. The dying man
blinked at the glare, and Happy Jack took off his hat and tilted it
over the face of the other, and asked him if he wouldn’t like to be
moved into the shade.

“No matter–I’ll be in the shade–soon enough,” he returned quietly,
and something gripped their throats to aching. His voice, they
observed, was weaker than it had been.

Weary took a long breath, and moved closer. “I wish you’d let us get
help,” he said, wistfully. It all seemed so horribly brutal, their
sitting around him like that, waiting passively for him to die.

“I know–yuh hate it. But it’s–all yuh can do. It’s all I want.”
He took his eyes from the drifting, white clouds, and looked from
face to face. “You’re the whitest bunch–I’d like to know–who yuh
are. Maybe I can put in–a good word for yuh–on the new
range–where I’m going. I’d sure like to do–something–”

“Then for the Lord’s sake, don’t say such things!” cried Pink,
shakily. “You’ll have us–so damn broke up–”

“All right–I won’t. So long,–boys. See yuh later–”

“Mamma!” whispered Weary, and got up hastily and walked away. Slim
followed him a few paces, then turned resolutely and went back. It
seemed cowardly to leave the rest to bear it–and somebody had to.
They were breathing quickly, and they were staring across the coulee
with eyes that saw nothing; their lips were shut very tightly
together. Weary came back and stood with his back turned. Pink
moved a bit, glanced furtively at the long, quiet figure beside him,
and dropped his face into his gloved hands.

Glory threw up his head, glanced across the coulee at a band of range
horses trooping down a gully to drink at the river, and whinnied
shrilly. The Happy Family started and awoke to the stern necessities
of life. They stood up, and walked a little way from the spot,
avoiding one another’s eyes.

“Somebody’ll have to go back to camp,” said Cal Emmett, in the hushed
tone that death ever compels from the living. “We’ve got to have a
spade–”

“It better be the handiest liar, then,” Jack Bates put in hastily.
“If that old loose-tongued Patsy ever gets next–”

“Weary better go–and Pink. They’re the best liars in the bunch,”
said Cal, trying unsuccessfully to get back his everyday manner.

Pink and Weary went over and took the dragging bridle-reins of their
mounts, caught a stirrup and swung up into the saddles silently.

“And say!” Happy Jack called softly, as they were going down the
slope. “Yuh better bring–a blanket.”

Weary nodded, and they rode away, their horses stepping softly in the
thick grasses. When they were passed quite out of the presence of
the dead, they spurred their horses into a gallop.

The sun marked mid-afternoon when they returned, and the four who had
waited drew long breaths of relief at sight of them.

“We told Patsy we’d run onto a–den–”

“Oh, shut up, can’t yuh?” Jack Bates interrupted shortly. “Yuh’ll
have plenty uh time to tell us afterwards.”

“We’ve got a place picked out,” said Cal, and led them a little
distance up the slope, to a level spot in the shadow of a huge, gray
bowlder. “That’s his headstone,” he said, soberly. “The poor devil
won’t be cheated out uh that, if we can’t mark it with his name.
It’ll last as long as he’ll need it.”

Only in the West, perhaps, may one find a funeral like that. No
minister stood at the head of the grave and read, “Dust to dust” and
all the heartbreaking rest of it. There was no singing but from a
meadowlark that perched on a nearby rock and rippled his brief song
when, with their ropes, they lowered the blanket wrapped form. They
stood, with bare heads bowed, while the meadow lark sang. When he
had flown, Pink, looking a choir-boy in disguise, repeated softly and
incorrectly the Lord’s prayer.

The Happy Family did not feel that there was any incongruity in what
they did. When Pink, gulping a little over the unfamiliar words,
said:

“Thine be power and glory–Amen;” five clear, youthful voices added
the Amen quite simply. Then they filled the grave and stood silent a
minute before they went down to where their horse stood waiting
patiently, with now and then a curious glance up the hill to where
their masters grouped.

The Happy Family mounted and without a backward glance rode soberly
away; and the trail they took led, not to the picnic, but to camp.

There was a dead man’s estate to be settled, over beyond the Bear Paws,
and several hundred head of cattle and horses had been sold to the
highest bidder, who was Chip Bennett, of the Flying U. Later, there
were the cattle and horses to be gathered and brought to the home
range; and Weary, always Chip’s choice when came need of a trusted man,
was sent to bring them. He was to hire what men he needed down there,
work the range with the Rocking R, and bring home the stock–when his
men could take the train and go back whence they had come.

The Happy Family was disappointed. Pink and Irish, especially, had
hoped to be sent along; for both knew well the range north of the Bear
Paws, and both would like to have made the trip with Weary. But men
were scarce and the Happy Family worked well together–so well that
Chip grudged every man of them that ever had to be sent afar. So Weary
went alone, and Pink and Irish watched him wistfully when he rode away
and were extremely unpleasant companions for the rest of that day, at
least.

Over beyond the Bear Paws men seemed scarcer even than around the
Flying U range. Weary scouted fruitlessly for help, wasted two days in
the search, and then rode to Bullhook and sent this wire–collect–to
Chip, and grinned as he wondered how much it would cost. He, too, had
rather resented being sent off down there alone.

  "C. BENNETT, Dry Lake:
  Can't get a man here for love or money.  Have
  tried both, and held one up with a gun.  No use.
  Couldn't top a saw horse.  For the Lord's sake,
  send somebody I know.  I want Irish and Pink
  and Happy--and I want them bad.  Get a move on.
    W. DAVIDSON."

Chip grinned when he read it, paid the bill, and told the three to get
ready to hit the trail. And the three grinned answer and immediately
became very busy; hitting the trail, in this case, meant catching the
next train out of Dry Lake, for there were horses bought with the
cattle, and much time would be saved by making up an outfit down there.

Weary rode dispiritedly into Sleepy Trail (which Irish usually spoke of
as Camas, because it had but lately been rechristened to avoid
conflictions with another Camas farther up on Milk River). Weary
thought, as he dismounted from Glory, which he had brought with him
from home, that Sleepy Trail fitted the place exactly, and that
whenever he heard Irish refer to it as Camas, he would call him down
and make him use this other and more appropriate title.

Sleepy it was, in that hazy sunshine of mid fore-noon, and apparently
deserted. He tied Glory to the long hitching pole where a mild-eyed
gray stood dozing on three legs, and went striding, rowels a-clank,
into the saloon. He had not had any answer to his telegram, and the
world did not look so very good to him. He did not know that Pink and
Irish and Happy Jack were even then speeding over the prairies on the
eastbound train from Dry Lake, to meet him. He had come to Sleepy
Trail to wait for the next stage, on a mere hope of some message from
the Flying U.

The bartender looked up, gave a little, welcoming whoop and leaned half
over the bar, hand extended. “Hello, Irish! Lord! When did you get
back?”

Weary smiled and shook the hand with much emphasis. Irish had once
created a sensation in Dry Lake by being taken for Weary; Weary
wondered if, in the guise of Irish, there might not be some diversion
for him here in Sleepy Trail. He remembered the maxim “Turn about is
fair play,” and immediately acted thereon.

“I just came down from the Flying U the other day,” he said.

The bartender half turned, reached a tall, ribbed bottle and two
glasses, and set them on the bar before Weary. “Go to it,” he invited
cordially. “I’ll gamble yuh brought your thirst right along with
yuh–and that’s your pet brand. Back to stay?”

Weary poured himself a modest “two fingers,” and wondered if he had
better claim to have reformed; Irish could–and did–drink long and
deep, where Weary indulged but moderately.

“No,” he said, setting the glass down without refilling. “They sent me
back on business. How’s everything?”

The bartender spoke his wonder at the empty glass, listened while Weary
explained how he had cut down his liquid refreshments “just to see how
it would go, and which was boss,” and then told much unmeaning gossip
about men and women Weary had never heard of before.

Weary listened with exaggerated interest, and wondered what the fellow
would do if he told him he was not Irish Mallory at all. He reflected,
with some amusement, that he did not even know what to call the
bartender, and tried to remember if Irish had ever mentioned him. He
was about to state quietly that he had never met him before, and watch
the surprise of the other, when the bartender grew more interesting.

“And say! yuh’d best keep your gun strapped on yuh, whilst you’re down
here,” he told Weary, with some earnestness. “Spikes Weber is in this
country–come just after yuh left; fact is, he’s got it into his block
that you left because he come. Brought his wife along–say! I feel
sorry for that little woman–and when he ain’t bowling up and singing
his war-song about you, and all he’ll do when he meets up with yuh,
he’s dealing her misery and keeping cases that nobody runs off with
her. Why, at dances, he won’t let her dance with nobody but him! Goes
plumb wild, sometimes, when it’s ‘change partners’ in a square dance,
and he sees her swingin’ with somebody he thinks looks good to her.
I’ve saw him raising hell with her, off in some corner between dances,
and her trying not to let on she’s cryin’. He’s dead sure you’re still
crazy over her, and ready to steal her away from him first chance, only
you’re afraid uh him. He never gits full but he reads out your
pedigree to the crowd. So I just thought I’d tell you, and let yuh be
on your guard.”

“Thanks,” said Weary, getting out papers and tobacco. “And whereabouts
will I find this lovely specimen uh manhood?”

“They’re stopping over to Bill Mason’s; but yuh better not go hunting
trouble, Irish. That’s the worst about putting yuh next to the lay.
You sure do love a fight. But I thought I’d let yuh know, as a friend,
so he wouldn’t take you unawares. Don’t be a fool and go out looking
for him, though; he ain’t worth the trouble.”

“I won’t,” Weary promised generously. “I haven’t lost nobody that
looks like Spikes-er-” he searched his memory frantically for the other
name, failed to get it, and busied himself with his cigarette, looking
mean and bloodthirsty to make up. “Still,” he added darkly, “if I
should happen to meet up with him, yuh couldn’t blame me–”

“Oh, sure not!” the bartender hastened to cut in. “It’d be a case uh
self-defence–the way he’s been makin’ threats. But–”

“Maybe,” hazarded Weary mildly, “you’d kinda like to see–her–a
widow?”

“From all accounts,” the other retorted, flushing a bit nevertheless,
“If yuh make her a widow, yuh won’t leave her that way long. I’ve
heard it said you was pretty far gone, there.”

Weary considered, the while he struck another match and relighted his
cigarette. He had not expected to lay bare any romance in the somewhat
tumultuous past of Irish. Irish had not seemed the sort of fellow who
had an unhappy love affair to dream of nights; he had seemed a
particularly whole-hearted young man.

“Well, yuh see,” he said vaguely, “Maybe I’ve got over it.”

The bartender regarded him fixedly and unbelievingly. “You’ll have
quite a contract making Spikes swallow that,” he remarked drily.

“Oh, damn Spikes,” murmured Weary, with the fine recklessness of Irish
in his tone.

At that moment a cowboy jangled in, caught sight of Weary’s back and
fell upon him joyously, hailing him as Irish. Weary was very glad to
see him, and listened assiduously for something that would give him a
clue to the fellow’s identity. In the meantime he called him “Say,
Old-timer,” and “Cully.” It had come to be a self-instituted point of
honor to play the game through without blundering. He waved his hand
hospitably toward the ribbed bottle, and told the stranger to “Throw
into yuh, Old-timer–it’s on me.” And when Old-timer straightway began
doing so, Weary leaned against the bar and wiped his forehead, and
wondered who the dickens the fellow could be. In Dry Lake, Irish had
been–well, hilarious–and not accountable for any little
peculiarities. In Sleepy Trail Weary was, perhaps he considered
unfortunately, sober and therefore obliged to feel his way carefully.

“Say! yuh want to keep your eyes peeled for Spikes Weber, Irish,”
remarked the unknown, after two drinks. “He’s pawing up the earth
whenever he hears your name called. He’s sure anxious to see the sod
packed down nice on top uh yuh.”

“So I heard; his nibs here,” indicating the bartender, “has been wising
me up, a lot. When’s the stage due, tomorrow, Oldtimer?” Weary was
getting a bit ashamed of addressing them both impartially in that
manner, but it was the best he could do, not knowing the names men
called them. In this instance he spoke to the bartender.

“Why, yuh going to pull out while your hide’s whole?” bantered the
cowboy, with the freedom which long acquaintance breeds.

“I’ve got business out uh town, and I want to be back time the stage
pulls in.”

“Well, Limpy’s still holding the ribbons over them buckskins uh his,
and he ain’t varied five minutes in five years,” responded the
bartender. “So I guess yuh can look for him same old time.”

Weary’s eyes opened a bit wider, then drooped humorously. “Oh, all
right,” he murmured, as though thoroughly enlightened rather than being
rather more in the dark than before. In the name of Irish he found it
expedient to take another modest drink, and then excused himself with a
“See yuh later, boys,” and went out and mounted Glory.

Ten miles nearer the railroad–which at that was not what even a
Montanan would call close–he had that day established headquarters and
was holding a bunch of saddle horses pending the arrival of help. He
rode out on the trail thoughtfully, a bit surprised that he had not
found the situation more amusing. To be taken for Irish was a joke,
and to learn thereby of Irish’s little romance should be funny. But it
wasn’t.

Weary wondered how Irish got mixed up in a deal like that, which
somehow did not seem to be in line with his character. And he wished,
a bit vindictively, that this Spikes Weber could meet Irish. He
rather thought that Spikes needed the chastening effects of such a
meeting. Weary, while not in the least quarrelsome on his own account,
was ever the staunch defender of a friend.

Just where another brown trail branched off and wandered away over a
hill to the east, a woman rode out and met him face to face. She
pulled up and gave a little cry that brought Weary involuntarily to a
halt.

“You!” she exclaimed, in a tone that Weary felt he had no right to hear
from any but his little schoolma’am. “But I knew you’d come back when
you heard I–Have–have you seen Spikes, Ira?”

Weary flushed embarrassment; this was no joke. “No,” he stammered, in
some doubt just how to proceed. “The fact is, you’ve made a little
mistake. I’m not–”

“Oh, you needn’t go on,” she interrupted, and her voice, had Weary
known it better, heralded the pouring out of a woman’s heart. “I know
I’ve made a mistake, all right; you don’t need to tell me that. And I
suppose you want to tell me that you’ve got over–things; that you
don’t care, any more. Maybe you don’t, but it’ll take a lot to make me
believe it. Because you did care, Ira. You cared, all right
enough!” She laughed in the way that makes one very uncomfortable.

“And maybe you’ll tell me that I didn’t. But I did, and I do yet. I
ain’t ashamed to say it, if I did marry Spikes Weber just to spite you.
That’s all it was, and you’d have found it out if you hadn’t gone off
the way you did. I hate Spikes Weber; and he knows it, Ira. He
knows I–care–for you, and he’s making my life a hell. Oh, maybe I
deserve it–but you won’t– Now you’ve come back, you can have it out
with him; and I–I almost hope you’ll kill him! I do, and I don’t care
if it is wicked. I–I don’t care for anything much, but–you.” She
had big, soft brown eyes, and a sweet, weak mouth, and she stopped and
looked at Weary in a way that he could easily imagine would be
irresistible–to a man who cared.

Weary felt that he was quite helpless. She had hurried out sentences
that sealed his lips. He could not tell her now that she had made a
mistake; that he was not Ira Mallory, but a perfect stranger. The only
thing to do now was to carry the thing through as tactfully as
possible, and get away as soon as he could. Playing he was Irish, he
found, was not without its disadvantages.

“What particular brand of hell has he been making for you?” he asked
her sympathetically.

“I wouldn’t think, knowing Spikes as you do, you’d need to ask,” she
said impatiently. “The same old brand, I guess. He gets drunk, and
then–I told him, right out, just after we were married, that I liked
you the best, and he don’t forget it; and he don’t let me. He swears
he’ll shoot you on sight–as if that would do any good! He hates you,
Ira.” She laughed again unpleasantly.

Weary, sitting uneasily in the saddle looking at her, wondered if Irish
really cared; or if, in Weary’s place, he would have sat there so
calmly and just looked at her. She was rather pretty, in a pink and
white, weak way. He could easily imagine her marrying Spikes Weber for
mere spite; what he could not imagine, was Irish in love with her.

It seemed almost as if she caught a glimmer of his thoughts, for she
reined closer, and her teeth were digging into her lower lip. “Well,
aren’t you going to do anything?” she demanded desperately. “You’re
here, and I’ve told you I–care. Are you going to leave me to bear
Spikes’ abuse always?”

“You married him,” Weary remarked mildly and a bit defensively. It
seemed to him that loyalty to Irish impelled him.

She tossed her head contemptuously. “It’s nice to throw that at me. I
might get back at you and say you loved me. You did, you know.”

“And you married Spikes; what can I do about it?”

“What–can–you–do–about it? Did you come back to ask me that?”
There was a well defined, white line around her mouth, and her eyes
were growing ominously bright.

Weary did not like the look of her, nor her tone. He felt, somehow,
glad that it was not Irish, but himself; Irish might have felt the
thrall of old times–whatever they were–and have been tempted. His
eyes, also, grew ominous, but his voice was very smooth. (Irish, too,
had that trait of being quietest when he was most roused.)

“I came back on business; I will confess I didn’t come to see you,” he
said. “I’m only a bone-headed cowpuncher, but even cowpunchers can
play square. They don’t, as a rule step in between a man and his wife.
You married Spikes, and according to your own tell, you did it to spite
me. So I say again, what can I do about it?”

She looked at him dazedly.

“Uh course,” he went on gently, “I won’t stand to see any man abuse his
wife, or bandy her name or mine around the country. If I should happen
to meet up with Spikes, there’ll likely be some dust raised. And if I
was you, and Spikes abused me, I’d quit him cold.”

“Oh, I see,” she said sharply, with an exaggeration of scorn. “You
have got over it, then. There’s someone else. I might have known a
man can’t be trusted to care for the same woman long. You ran after me
and acted the fool, and kept on till you made me believe you really
meant all you said–”

“And you married Spikes,” Weary reiterated–ungenerously, perhaps; but
it was the only card he felt sure of. There was no gainsaying that
fact, it seemed. She had married Spikes in a fit of pique at Irish.
Still, it was not well to remind her of it too often. In the next five
minutes of tumultuous recrimination, Weary had cause to remember what
Shakespeare has to say about a woman scorned, and he wondered, more
than ever, if Irish had really cared. The girl–even now he did not
know what name to call her–was showing a strain of coarse temper; the
temper that must descend to personalities and the calling of
unflattering names. Weary, not being that type of male human who can
retort in kind, sat helpless and speechless the while she berated him.
When at last he found opportunity for closing the interview and riding
on, her anger-sharpened voice followed him shrewishly afar. Weary
breathed deep relief when the distance swallowed it, and lifted his
gray hat to wipe his beaded forehead.

“Mamma mine!” he said fervently to Glory. “Irish was sure playing big
luck when she did marry Spikes; and I don’t wonder at the poor devil
taking to drink. I would, too, if my little schoolma’am–”

At the ranch, he hastened to make it quite plain that he was not Ira
Mallory, but merely his cousin, Will Davidson. He was quite determined
to put a stop to all this annoying mixing up of identities. And as for
Spikes Weber, since meeting the woman Spikes claimed from him something
very like sympathy; only Weary had no mind to stand calmly and hear
Irish maligned by anybody.

The next day he rode again to Sleepy Trail to meet the stage, hoping
fervently that he would get some word–and that favorable–from Chip.
He was thinking, just then, a great deal about his own affairs and not
at all about the affairs of Irish. So that he was inside the saloon
before he remembered that the bartender knew him for Irish.

The bartender nodded to him in friendly fashion, and jerked his head
warningly toward a far corner where two men sat playing seven-up
half-heartedly. Weary looked, saw that both were strangers, and
puzzled a minute over the mysterious gesture of the bartender. It did
not occur to him, just then, that one of the men might be Spikes Weber.

The man who was facing him nipped the corners of the cards idly
together and glanced up; saw Weary standing there with an elbow on the
bar looking at him, and pushed back his chair with an oath unmistakably
warlike. Weary resettled his hat and looked mildly surprised. The
bartender moved out of range and watched breathlessly.

“You —- —- ——–!” swore Spikes Weber, coming truculently
forward, hand to hip. He was of medium height and stockily built, with
the bull neck and little, deep-set eyes that go often with a nature
quarrelsome.

Weary still leaned his elbow on the bar and smiled at him tolerantly.
“Feel bad anywhere?” he wanted to know, when the other was very close.

Spikes Weber, from very surprise, stopped and regarded Weary for a
space before he began swearing again. His hand was still at his hip,
but the gun it touched remained in his pocket. Plainly, he had not
expected just this attitude.

Weary waited, smothering a yawn, until the other finished a
particularly pungent paragraph. “A good jolt uh brandy ‘ll sometimes
cure a bad case uh colic,” he remarked. “Better have our friend here
fix yuh up–but it’ll be on you. I ain’t paying for drinks just now.”

Spikes snorted and began upon the pedigree and general character of
Irish. Weary took his elbow off the bar, and his eyes lost their
sunniness and became a hard blue, darker than was usual. It took a
good deal to rouse Weary to the fighting point, and it is saying much
for the tongue of Spikes that Weary was roused thoroughly.

“That’ll be about enough,” he said sharply, cutting short a sentence
from the other. “I kinda hated to start in and take yuh all to
pieces–but yuh better saw off right there, or I can’t be responsible–”

A gun barrel caught the light menacingly, and Weary sprang like the
pounce of a cat, wrested the gun from the hand of Spikes and rapped him
smartly over the head with the barrel. “Yuh would, eh?” he snarled,
and tossed the gun upon the bar, where the bartender caught it as it
slid along the smooth surface and put it out of reach.

After that, chairs went spinning out of the way, and glasses jingled to
the impact of a body striking the floor with much force. Came the
slapping sound of hammering fists and the scuffling of booted feet,
together with the hard breathing of fighting men.

Spikes, on his back, looked up into the blazing eyes he thought were
the eyes of Irish and silently acknowledged defeat. But Weary would
not let it go at that.

“Are yuh whipped to a finish, so that yuh don’t want any more trouble
with anybody?” he wanted to know.

Spikes hesitated but the fraction of a second before he growled a
reluctant yes.

“Are yuh a low-down, lying sneak of a woman-fighter, that ain’t got
nerve enough to stand up square to a ten-year-old boy?”

Spikes acknowledged that he was. Before the impromptu catechism was
ended, Spikes had acknowledged other and more humiliating things–to
the delectation of the bartender, the stage driver and two or three men
of leisure who were listening.

When Spikes had owned to being every mean, unknowable thing that Weary
could call to mind–and his imagination was never of the barren
sort–Weary generously permitted him to get upon his feet and skulk out
to where his horse was tied. After that, Weary gave his unruffled
attention to the stage driver and discovered the unwelcome fact that
there was no letter and no telegram for one William Davidson, who
looked a bit glum when he heard it.

So he, too, went out and mounted Glory and rode away to the ranch where
waited the horses; and as he went he thought, for perhaps the first
time in his life, some hard and unflattering things of Chip Bennett.
He had never dreamed Chip would calmly overlook his needs and leave him
in the lurch like this.

At the ranch, when he had unsaddled Glory and gone to the bunk-house,
he discovered Irish, Pink and Happy Jack wrangling amicably over whom a
certain cross-eyed girl on the train had been looking at most of the
time. Since each one claimed all the glances for himself, and since
there seemed no possible way of settling the dispute, they gave over
the attempt gladly when Weary appeared, and wanted to know, first
thing, who or what had been gouging the hide off his face.

Weary, not aware until the moment that he was wounded, answered that he
had done it shaving; at which the three hooted derision and wanted to
know since when he had taken to shaving his nose. Weary smiled
inscrutably and began talking of something else until he had weaned
them from the subject, and learned that they had bribed the stage
driver to let them off at this particular ranch; for the stage driver
knew Irish, and knew also that a man he had taken to be Irish was
making this place his headquarters. The stage driver was one of those
male gossips who know everything.

When he could conveniently do so, Weary took Irish out of hearing of
the others and told him about Spikes Weber. Irish merely swore. After
that, Weary told him about Spikes Weber’s wife, in secret fear and with
much tact, but in grim detail. Irish listened with never a word to say.

“I done what looked to me the best thing, under the circumstances,”
Weary apologized at the last, “and I hope I haven’t mixed yuh up a
bunch uh trouble. Mamma mine! she’s sure on the fight, though, and
she’s got a large, black opinion of yuh as a constant lover. If yuh
want to square yourself with her, Irish, you’ve got a big contract.”

“I don’t want to square myself,” Irish retorted, grinning a bit. “I
did have it bad, I admit; but when she went and got tied up to Spikes,
that cured me right off. She’s kinda pretty, and girls were scarce,
and–oh, hell! you know how it goes with a man. I’d a married her and
found out afterwards that her mind was like a little paper windmill
stuck up on the gatepost with a shingle nail–only she saved me the
trouble. Uh course, I was some sore over the deal for awhile; but I
made up my mind long ago that Spikes was the only one in the bunch that
had any sympathy coming. If he’s been acting up like you say, I change
the verdict: there ain’t anything coming to him but a big bunch uh
trouble. I’m much obliged to yuh, Weary; you done me a good turn and
earnt a lot uh gratitude, which is yours for keeps. Wonder if supper
ain’t about due; I’ve the appetite of a Billy goat, if anybody should
ask yuh.”

At supper Irish was uncommonly silent, and did some things without
thinking; such as pouring a generous stream of condensed cream into his
coffee. Weary, knowing well that Irish drank his coffee without cream,
watched him a bit closer than he would otherwise have done; Irish was
the sort of man who does not always act by rule.

After supper Weary missed him quite suddenly, and went to the door of
the bunk-house to see where he had gone. He did not see Irish, but on
a hilltop, in the trail that led to Sleepy Trail, he saw a flurry of
dust. Two minutes of watching saw it drift out of sight over the hill,
which proved that the maker was traveling rapidly away from the ranch.
Weary settled his hat down to his eyebrows and went out to find the
foreman.

The foreman, down at the stable, said that Irish had borrowed a horse
from him, unsacked his saddle as if he were in a hurry about something,
and had pulled out on a high lope. No, he had not told the foreman
where he was headed for, and the foreman knew Irish too well to ask.
Yes, now Weary spoke of it, Irish did have his gun buckled on him, and
he headed for Sleepy Trail.

Weary waited for no further information. He threw his saddle on a
horse that he knew could get out and drift, if need came: presently he,
too, was chasing a brown dust cloud over the hill toward Sleepy Trail.

That Irish had gone to find Spikes Weber, Weary was positive; that
Spikes was not a man who could be trusted to fight fair, he was even
more positive. Weary, however, was not afraid for Irish–he was merely
a bit uneasy and a bit anxious to be on hand when came the meeting. He
spurred along the trail darkening with the afterglow of a sun departed
and night creeping down upon the land, and wondered whether he would be
able to come up with Irish before he reached town.

At the place where the trail forked–the place where he had met the
wife of Spikes, he saw from a distance another rider gallop out of the
dusk and follow in the way that Irish had gone. Without other evidence
than mere instinct, he knew the horseman for Spikes. When, further
along, the horseman left the trail and angled away down a narrow
coulee, Weary rode a bit faster. He did not know the country very
well, and was not sure of where that coulee led; but he knew the nature
of a man like Spikes Weber, and his uneasiness was not lulled at the
sight. He meant to overtake Irish, if he could; after that he had no
plan whatever.

When, however, he came to the place where Spikes had turned off. Weary
turned off also and followed down the coulee; and he did not explain
why, even to himself. He only hurried to overtake the other, or at
least to keep him in sight.

The darkness lightened to bright starlight, with a moon not yet in its
prime to throw shadows black and mysterious against the coulee sides.
The coulee itself, Weary observed, was erratic in the matter of height,
width and general direction. Places there were where the width
dwindled until there was scant room for the cow trail his horse
conscientiously followed; places there were where the walls were easy
slopes to climb, and others where the rocks hung, a sheer hundred feet,
above him.

One of the easy slopes came near throwing him off the trail of Spikes.
He climbed the slope, and Weary would have ridden by, only that he
caught a brief glimpse of something on the hilltop; something that
moved, and that looked like a horseman. Puzzled but persistent, Weary
turned back where the slope was easiest, and climbed also. He did not
know the country well enough to tell, in that come-and-go light made
uncertain by drifting clouds, just where he was or where he would bring
up; he only knew instinctively that where Spikes rode, trouble rode
also.

Quite suddenly at the last came further knowledge. It was when, still
following, he rode along a steeply sloping ridge that narrowed
perceptibly, that he looked down, down, and saw, winding brownly in the
starlight, a trail that must be the trail he had left at the coulee
head.

“Mamma!” he ejaculated softly, and strained eyes under his hatbrim to
glimpse the figure he knew rode before. Then, looking down again, he
saw a horseman galloping rapidly towards the ridge, and pulled up short
when he should have done the opposite–for it was then that seconds
counted.

When the second glance showed the horseman to be Irish, Weary drove in
his spurs and galloped forward. Ten leaps perhaps he made, when a
rifle shot came sharply ahead. He glanced down and saw horse and rider
lying, a blotch of indefinable shape, in the trail. Weary drew his own
gun and went on, his teeth set tight together. Now, when it was too
late, he understood thoroughly the situation.

He came clattering out of the gloom to the very, point of the bluff,
just where it was highest and where it crowded closest the trail a long
hundred feet below. A man stood there on the very edge, with a rifle
in his hands. He may have been crouching, just before, but now he was
standing erect, looking fixedly down at the dark heap in the trail
below, and his figure, alert yet unwatchful, was silhouetted sharply
against the sky.

When Weary, gun at aim, charged furiously down upon him, he whirled,
ready to give battle for his life; saw the man he supposed was lying
down there dead in the trail, and started backward with a yell of pure
terror. “Irish!” He toppled, threw the rifle from him in a single
convulsive movement and went backward, down and down.–

Weary got off his horse and, gun still gripped firmly, walked to the
edge and looked down. In his face, dimly revealed in the fitful
moonlight, there was no pity but a look of baffled vengeance. Down at
the foot of the bluff the shadows lay deep and hid all they held, but
out in the trail something moved, rose up and stood still a moment, his
face turned upward to where stood Weary.

“Are yuh hurt, Irish?” Weary called anxiously down to him.

“Never touched me,” came the answer from below. “He got my horse, damn
him! and I just laid still and kept cases on what he’d do next. Come
on down!”

Weary was already climbing recklessly down to where the shadows reached
long arms up to him. It was not safe, in that uncertain light, but
Weary was used to taking chances. Irish, standing still beside the
dead horse, watched and listened to the rattle of small stones
slithering down, and the clink of spur chains upon the rocks.

Together the two went into the shadows and stood over a heap of
something that had been a man.

“I never did kill a man,” Weary remarked, touching the heap lightly
with his foot. “But I sure would have, that time, if he hadn’t dropped
just before I cut loose on him.”

Irish turned and looked at him. Standing so, one would have puzzled
long to know them apart. “You’ve done a lot for me, Weary, this trip,”
he said gravely. “I’m sure obliged.”

It was four o’clock, and there was consternation in the round-up camp
of the Flying U; when one eats breakfast before dawn–July dawn at
that–covers thirty miles of rough country before eleven o’clock dinner
and as many more after, supper seems, for the time being, the most
important thing in the life of a cowboy.

Men stood about in various dejected attitudes, their thumbs tucked
inside their chap-belts, blank helplessness writ large upon their
perturbed countenances–they were the aliens, hired but to make a full
crew during round-up. Long-legged fellows with spurs a-jingle hurried
in and out of the cook-tent, colliding often, shouting futile
questions, commands and maledictions–they were the Happy Family:
loyal, first and last to the Flying U, feeling a certain degree of
proprietorship and a good deal of responsibility.

Happy Jack was fanning an incipient blaze in the sheet-iron stove with
his hat, his face red and gloomy at the prospect of having to satisfy
fifteen outdoor appetites with his amateur attempts at cooking. Behind
the stove, writhing bulkily upon a hastily unrolled bed, lay Patsy,
groaning most pitiably.

“What the devil’s the matter with that hot water?” Cal Emmett yelled at
Happy Jack from the bedside, where he was kneeling sympathetically.

Happy Jack removed his somber gaze from the licking tongue of flame
which showed in the stove-front. “Fire ain’t going good, yet,” he said
in a matter-of-fact tone which contrasted sharply with Cal’s
excitement. “Teakettle’s dry, too. I sent a man to the crick for a
bucket uh water; he’ll be back in a minute.”

“Well, move! If it was you tied in a knot with cramp, yuh wouldn’t
take it so serene.”

“Aw, gwan. I got troubles enough, cooking chuck for this here layout.
I got to have some help–and lots of it. Patsy ain’t got enough stuff
cooked up to feed a jack-rabbit. Somebody’s got to mosey in here and
peel the spuds.”

“That’s your funeral,” said Cal, unfeelingly.

Chip stuck his head under the lifted tent-flap. “Say, I can’t find
that cussed Three-H bottle,” he complained. “What went with it, Cal?”

“Ask Slim; he had it last. Ain’t Shorty here, yet?” Cal turned again
to Patsy, whose outcries were not nice to listen to, “Stay with it,
old-timer; we’ll have something hot to pour down yuh in a minute.”

Patsy replied, but pain made him incoherent. Cal caught the word
“poison”, and then “corn”; the rest of the sentence was merely a
succession of groans.

The face of Cal lengthened perceptibly. He got up and went out to
where the others were wrangling with Slim over the missing bottle of
liniment.

“I guess the old boy’s up against it good and plenty,” he announced
gravely. “He says he’s poisoned; he says it was the corn.”

“Well he had it coming to him,” declared Jack Pates. “He’s stuck that
darned canned corn under our noses every meal since round-up started.
He–”

“Oh, shut up,” snarled Cal. “I guess it won’t be so funny if he cashes
in on the strength of it. I’ve known two or three fellows that was
laid out cold with tin-can poison. It’s sure fierce.”

The Happy Family shifted uneasily before the impending tragedy, and
their faces paled a little; for nearly every man of the range dreads
ptomaine poisoning more than the bite of a rattler. One can kill a
rattler, and one is always warned of its presence; but one never can
tell what dire suffering may lurk beneath the gay labels of canned
goods. But since one must eat, and since canned vegetables are far and
away better than no vegetables at all, the Happy Family ate and took
their chance–only they did not eat canned corn, and they had discussed
the matter profanely and often with Patsy.

Patsy was a slave of precedent. Many seasons had he cooked beneath a
round-up tent, and never had he stocked the mess-wagon for a long trip
and left canned corn off the list. It was good to his palate and it
was easy to prepare, and no argument could wean him from imperturbably
opening can after can, eating plentifully of it himself and throwing
the rest to feed the gophers.

“Ain’t there anything to give him?” asked Jack, relenting. “That
Three-H would fix him up all right–”

“Dig it up, then,” snapped Cal. “There’s sure something got to be
done, or we’ll have a dead cook on our hands.”

“Not even a drop uh whisky in camp!” mourned Weary. “Slim, you ought
to be killed for getting away with that liniment.”

Slim was too downhearted to resent the tone. “By golly, I can’t think
what I done with it after I used it on Banjo. Seems like I stood it on
that rock–”

“Oh, hell!” snorted Cal. “That’s forty miles back.”

“Say, it’s sure a fright!” sympathized Jack Bates as a muffled shriek
came through the cloth wall of the tent. “What’s good for tincaneetis,
I wonder?”

“A rattling good doctor,” retorted Chip, throwing things recklessly
about, still searching. “There goes the damn butter–pick it up, Cal.”

“If old Dock was sober, he could do something,” suggested Weary. “I
guess I’d better go after him; what do yuh think?”

“He could send out some stuff–if he was sober enough; he’s sure wise
on medicine.”

Weary made him a cigarette. “Well, it’s me for Dry Lake,” he said,
crisply. “I reckon Patsy can hang on till I get back; can poison
doesn’t do the business inside several hours, and he hasn’t been sick
long. He was all right when Happy Jack hit camp about two o’clock.
I’ll be back by dark–I’ll ride Glory.” He swung up on the nearest
horse, which happened to be Chip’s and raced out to the saddle bunch a
quarter of a mile away. The Happy Family watched him go and called
after him, urging him unnecessarily to speed.

Weary did not waste time having the bunch corralled but rode in among
the horses, his rope down and ready for business. Glory stared
curiously, tossed his crimpled, silver mane, dodged a second too late
and found himself caught.

It was unusual, this interruption just when he was busy cropping sweet
grasses and taking his ease, but he supposed there was some good reason
for it; at any rate he submitted quietly to being saddled and merely
nipped Weary’s shoulder once and struck out twice with an ivory-white,
daintily rounded hoof–and Weary was grateful for the docile mood he
showed.

He mounted hurriedly without a word of praise or condemnation, and his
silence was to Glory more unusual than being roped and saddled on the
range. He seemed to understand that the stress was great, and fairly
bolted up the long, western slope of the creek bottom straight toward
the slant of the sun.

For two miles he kept the pace unbroken, though the way was not of the
smoothest and there was no trail to follow. Straight away to the west,
with fifteen miles of hills and coulees between, lay Dry Lake; and in
Dry Lake lived the one man in the country who might save Patsy.

“Old Dock” was a land-mark among old-timers. The oldest pioneer found
Dock before him among the Indians and buffalo that ran riot over the
wind-brushed prairie where now the nation’s beef feeds quietly. Why he
was there no man could tell; he was a fresh-faced young Frenchman with
much knowledge of medicine and many theories, and a reticence
un-French. From the Indians he learned to use strange herbs that
healed almost magically the ills of man; from the rough out-croppings
of civilization he learned to swallow vile whiskey in great gulps, and
to thirst always for more.

So he grew old while the West was yet young, until Dry Lake, which grew
up around him, could not remember him as any but a white-bearded,
stooped, shuffling old man who spoke a queer jargon and was always just
getting drunk or sober. When he was sober his medicines never failed
to cure; when he was drunk he could not be induced to prescribe, so
that men trusted his wisdom at all times and tolerated his infirmities,
and looked upon him with amused proprietorship.

When Weary galloped up the trail which, because a few habitations are
strewn with fine contempt of regularity upon either side, is called by
courtesy a street, his eyes sought impatiently for the familiar,
patriarchal figure of Old Dock. He felt that minutes were worth much
and that if he would save Patsy he must cut out all superfluities, so
he resolutely declined to remember that cold, foamy beer refreshes one
amazingly after a long, hot ride in the dust and the wind.

Upon the porch of Rusty Brown’s place men were gathered, and it was
evident even at a distance that they were mightily amused. Weary
headed for the spot and stopped beside the hitching pole. Old Dock
stood in the center of the group and his bent old figure was trembling
with rage. With both hands he waved aloft his coat, on which was
plastered a sheet of “tangle-foot” fly-paper.

“Das wass de mean treeck!” he was shouting. “I don’d do de harm wis no
mans. I tend mine business, I buy me mine clothes. De mans wass do
dees treeck, he buy me new clothes–you bet you! Dass wass de mean–”

“Say, Dock,” broke in Weary, towering over him, “you dig up some dope
for tin-can poison, and do it quick. Patsy’s took bad.”

Old Dock looked up at him and shook his shaggy, white beard. “Das wass
de mean treeck,” he repeated, waving the coat at Weary. “You see dass?
Mine coat, she ruint; dass was new coat!”

“All right–I’ll take your word for it, Dock. Tell me what’s good for
tin–”

“Aw, I knows you fellers. You t’inke Ole Dock, she Dock, she don’d
know nothings! You t’ink–”

Weary sighed and turned to the crowd. “Which end of a jag is this?” he
wanted to know. “I’ve got to get some uh that dope-wisdom out uh him,
somehow. Patsy’s a goner, sure, if I don’t connect with some medicine.”

The men crowded close and asked questions which Weary felt bound to
answer; everyone knew Patsy, who was almost as much a part of Dry Lake
scenery as was Old Dock, and it was gratifying to a Flying-U man to see
the sympathy in their faces. But Patsy needed something more potent
than sympathy, and the minutes were passing.

Old Dock still discoursed whimperingly upon the subject of his ruined
coat and the meanness of mankind, and there was no weaning his interest
for a moment, try as Weary would. And fifteen miles away in a
picturesque creek-bottom a man lay dying in great pain for want of one
little part of the wisdom stored uselessly away in the brain of this
drunken, doddering old man.

Weary’s gloved hand dropped in despair from Old Dock’s bent shoulder.
“Damn a drunkard!” he said bitterly, and got into the saddle. “Rusty,
I’ll want to borrow that calico cayuse uh yours. Have him saddled up
right away, will yuh? I’ll be back in a little bit.”

He jerked his hat down to his eyebrows and struck Glory with the quirt;
but the trail he took was strange to Glory and he felt impelled to stop
and argue–as only Glory could argue–with his master. Minutes passed
tumultuously, with nothing accomplished save some weird hoof-prints in
the sod. Eventually, however, Glory gave over trying to stand upon his
head and his hind feet at one and the same instant, and permitted
himself to be guided toward a certain tiny, low-eaved cabin in a meadow
just over the hill from the town.

Weary was not by nature given to burglary, but he wrenched open the
door of the cabin and went in with not a whisper of conscience to say
him nay. It was close and ill-smelling and very dirty inside, but
after the first whiff Weary did not notice it. He went over and
stopped before a little, old-fashioned chest; it was padlocked, so he
left that as a last resort and searched elsewhere for what he
wanted–medicine. Under the bed he found a flat, black case, such as
old-fashioned doctors carried. He drew it out and examined if
critically. This, also, was locked, but he shook it tentatively and
heard the faintest possible jingle inside.

“Bottles,” he said briefly, and grinned satisfaction. Something
brushed against his hat and he looked up into a very dusty bunch of
herbs. “You too,” he told them, breaking the string with one yank.
“For all I know, yuh might stand ace-high in this game. Lord! if I
could trade brains with the old devil, just for to-night!”

He took a last look around, decided that he had found all he wanted,
and went out and pulled the door shut. Then he tied the black medicine
case to the saddle in a way that would give it the least jar, stuffed
the bunch of dried herbs into his pocket and mounted for the homeward
race. As he did so the sun threw a red beam into his eyes as though
reminding him of the passing hours, and ducked behind the ridge which
bounds Lonesome Prairie on the east.

The afterglow filled sky and earth with a soft, departing radiance when
he stopped again in front of the saloon. Old Doc was still
gesticulating wildly, and the sheet of fly-paper still clung to the
back of his coat. The crowd had thinned somewhat and displayed less
interest; otherwise the situation had not changed, except that a pinto
pony stood meekly, with head drooping, at the hitching-pole.

“There’s your horse,” Rusty Brown called to Weary. “Yours played out?”

“Not on your life,” Weary denied proudly. “When yuh see Glory played
out, you’ll see him with four feet in the air.”

“I seen him that way half an hour ago, all right,” bantered Bert Rogers.

Weary passed over the joke. “Mamma! Has it been that long?” he cried
uneasily. “I’ve got to be moving some. Here, Dock, you put on that
coat–and never mind the label; it’s got to go–and so have you.”

“Aw, he’s no good to yuh, Weary,” they protested. “He’s too drunk to
tell chloroform from dried apricots.”

“That’ll be all right,” Weary assured them confidently. “I guess he’ll
be some sober by the time we hit camp. I went and dug up his dope-box,
so he can get right to work when he arrives. Send him out here.”

“Say, he can’t never top off Powderface, Weary. I thought yuh was
going to ride him yourself. It’s plumb wicked to put that old
centurion on him. He wouldn’t be able to stay with him a mile.”

“That’s a heap farther than he could get with Glory,” said Weary,
unmoved. “Yuh don’t seem to realize that Patsy’s just next thing to a
dead man, and Dock has got the name of what’ll cure him sloshing around
amongst all that whiskey in his head. I can’t wait for him to sober
up–I’m just plumb obliged to take him along, jag and all. Come on,
Dock; this is a lovely evening for a ride.”

Dock objected emphatically with head, arms, legs and much mixed
dialect. But Weary climbed down and, with the help of Bert Rogers,
carried him bodily and lifted him into the saddle. When the pinto
began to offer some objections, strong hands seized his bridle and held
him angrily submissive.

“He’ll tumble off, sure as yuh live,” predicted Bert; but Weary never
did things by halves; he shook his head and untied his coiled rope.

“By the Lord! I hate to see a man ride into town and pack off the only
heirloom we got,” complained Rusty Brown. “Dock’s been handed down
from generation to Genesis, and there ain’t hardly a scratch on him.
If yuh don’t bring him back in good order Weary Davidson, there’ll be
things doing.”

Weary looked up from taking the last half-hitch around the saddle horn.
“Yuh needn’t worry,” he said. “This medical monstrosity is more
valuable to me than he is to you, right now. I’ll handle him careful.”

“Das wass de mean treeck!” cried Dock, for all the world like a parrot.

“It sure is, old boy,” assented Weary cheerfully, and tied the pinto’s
bridle-reins into a hard knot at the end. With the reins in his hand
he mounted Glory. “Your pinto’ll lead, won’t he?” he asked Rusty then.
It was like Weary to take a thing for granted first, and ask questions
about it afterward.

“Maybe he will–he never did, so far,” grinned Rusty. “It’s plumb
insulting to a self-respecting cow-pony to make a pack-horse out uh
him. I wouldn’t be none surprised if yuh heard his views on the
subjects before yuh git there.”

“It’s an honor to pack heirlooms,” retorted Weary. “So-long, boys.”

Old Dock made a last, futile effort to free himself and then settled
down in the saddle and eyed the world sullenly from under frost-white
eyebrows heavy as a military mustache. He did not at that time look
particularly patriarchal; more nearly he resembled a humbled, entrapped
Santa Claus.

They started off quite tamely. The pinto leaned far back upon the
bridle-reins and trotted with stiff, reluctant legs that did not
promise speed; but still h went, and Weary drew a relieved breath. His
arm was like to ache frightfully before they covered a quarter of the
fifteen miles, but he did not mind that much; besides, he guessed
shrewdly that the pinto would travel better once they were well out of
town.

The soft, warm dusk of a July evening crept over the land and a few
stars winked at them facetiously. Over by the reedy creek, frogs
cr-ek-ek-ekked in a tuneless medley and night-hawks flapped silently
through the still air, swooping suddenly with a queer, whooing rush
like wind blowing through a cavern. Familiar sounds they were to
Weary–so familiar that he scarce heard them; though he would have felt
a vague, uneasy sense of something lost had they stilled unexpectedly.
Out in the lane which leads to the open range-land between wide reaches
of rank, blue-joint meadows, a new sound met them–the faint, insistent
humming of millions of mosquitoes. Weary dug Glory with his spurs and
came near having his arm jerked from its socket before he could pull
him in again. He swore a little and swung round in the saddle.

“Can’t yuh dig a little speed into that cayuse with your heels, Dock?”
he cried to the resentful heirloom. “We’re going to be naturally
chewed up if we don’t fan the breeze along here.”

“Ah don’d care–das wass de mean treeck!” growled Dock into his beard.

Weary opened his mouth, came near swallowing a dozen mosquitoes alive,
and closed it again. What would it profit him to argue with a drunken
man? He slowed till the pinto, still moving with stiff, reluctant
knees, came alongside, and struck him sharply with his quirt; the pinto
sidled and Dock lurched over as far as Weary’s rope would permit.

“Come along, then!” admonished Weary, under his breath.

The pinto snorted and ran backward until Weary wished he had been
content with the pace of a snail. Then the mosquitoes swooped down
upon them in a cloud and Glory struck out, fighting and kicking
viciously. Presently Weary found himself with part of the pinto’s
bridle-rein in his hand, and the memory of a pale object disappearing
into the darkness ahead.

For the time being he was wholly occupied with his own horse; but when
Glory was minded to go straight ahead instead of in a circle, he gave
thought to his mission and thanked the Lord that Dock was headed in the
right direction. He gave chase joyfully; for every mile covered in
that fleet fashion meant an added chance for Patsy’s life. Even the
mosquitoes found themselves hopelessly out of the race and beat up
harmlessly in the rear. So he galloped steadily upon the homeward
trail; and a new discomfort forced itself upon his consciousness–the
discomfort of swift riding while a sharp-cornered medicine-case of
generous proportions thumped regularly against his leg. At first he
did not mind it so much, but after ten minutes of riding so, the thing
grew monotonously painful and disquieting to the nerves.

Five miles from the town he sighted the pinto; it was just disappearing
up a coulee which led nowhere–much less to camp. Weary’s
self-congratulatory mood changed to impatience; he followed after. Two
miles, and he reached the unclimbable head of the coulee–and no pinto.
He pulled up and gazed incredulously at the blank, sandstone walls;
searched long for some hidden pathway to the top and gave it up.

He rode back slowly under the stars, a much disheartened Weary. He
thought of Patsy’s agony and gritted his teeth at his own impotence.
After awhile he thought of Old Dock lashed to the pinto’s saddle, and
his conscience awoke and badgered him unmercifully for the thing he had
done and the risk he had taken with one man’s life that he might save
the life of another.

Down near the mouth of the coulee he came upon a cattle trail winding
up toward the stars. For the lack of a better clue he turned into it
and urged Glory faster than was wise if he would save the strength of
his horse; but Glory was game as long as he could stand, and took the
hill at a lope with never a protest against the pace.

Up on the top the prairie stretched mysteriously away to the sky-line,
with no sound to mar the broody silence, and with never a movement to
disturb the deep sleep of the grass-land. All day had the hills been
buffeted by a sweeping West wind; but the breeze had dropped with the
sun, as though tired with roistering and slept without so much as a
dream-puff to shake the dew from the grasses.

Weary stopped to wind his horse and to listen, but not a hoof-beat came
to guide him in his search. He leaned and shifted the medicine case a
bit to ease his bruised leg, and wished he might unlock the healing
mysteries and the magic stored within. It seemed to him a cruel world
and unjust that knowledge must be gleaned slowly, laboriously, while
men died miserably for want of it. Worse, that men who had gleaned
should be permitted to smother such precious knowledge in the
stupefying fumes of whiskey.

If he could only have appropriated Dock’s brain along with his
medicines, he might have been in camp by now, ministering to Patsy
before it was too late to do anything. Without a doubt the boys were
scanning anxiously the ridge, confident that he would not fail them
though impatient for his coming. And here he sat helplessly upon a
hilltop under the stars, many miles from camp, with much medicine just
under his knee and a pocket crammed with an unknown, healing herb, as
useless after all his effort as he had been in camp when they could not
find the Three-H liniment.

Glory turned his head and regarded him gravely out of eyes near human
in their questioning, and Weary laid caressing hand upon his silvery
mane, grateful for the sense of companionship which it gave.

“You’re sure a wise little nag.” he said wistfully, and his voice
sounded strange in the great silence. “Maybe you can find ‘em–and it
you can, I’ll sure be grateful; you can paw the stars out uh high
heaven and I won’t take my quirt off my saddle-horn; hope I may die if
I do!”

Glory stamped one white hoof and pointed both ears straight forward,
threw up his head and whinnied a shrill question into the night. Weary
hopefully urged him with his knees. Glory challenged once again and
struck out eagerly, galloping lightly in spite of the miles he had
covered. Far back on the bench-land came faint answer to his call, and
Weary laughed from sheer relief. By the stars the night was yet young,
and he grew hopeful–almost complacent.

Glory planted both forefeet deep in the prairie sod and skidded on the
brink of a deep cut-bank. It was a close shave, such as comes often to
those who ride the range by night. Weary looked down into blackness
and then across into gloom. The place was too deep and sheer to ride
into, and too wide to jump; clearly, they must go around it.

Going around a gulley is not always the simple thing it sounds,
especially when one is not sure as to the direction it takes. To find
the head under such conditions requires time.

Weary thought he knew the place and turned north secure in the belief
that the gulley ran south into the coulee he had that evening
fruitlessly explored. As a matter of fact it opened into a coulee
north of them, and in that direction it grew always deeper and more
impassable even by daylight.

On a dark night, with only the stars to guide one and to accentuate the
darkness, such a discovery brings with it confusion of locality. Weary
drew up when he could go no farther without plunging headlong into
blackness, and mentally sketched a map of that particular portion of
the globe and tried to find in it a place where the gulch might
consistently lie. After a minute he gave over the attempt and admitted
to himself that, according to his mental map, it could not consistently
lie anywhere at all. Even Glory seemed to have lost interest in the
quest and stood listlessly with his head down. His attitude irritated
Weary very much.

“Yuh damn’, taffy colored cayuse!” he said fretfully. “This is as much
your funeral as mine–seeing yuh started out all so brisk to find that
pinto. Do yah suppose yuh could find a horse if he was staked ten feet
in front of your nose? Chances are, yuh couldn’t. I reckon you’d have
trouble finding your way around the little pasture at the ranch–unless
the sun shone real bright and yuh had somebody to lead yuh!”

This was manifestly unjust and it was not like Weary; but this night’s
mission was getting on his nerves. He leaned and shifted the
medicine-case again, and felt ruefully of his bruised leg. That also
was getting upon his nerves.

“Oh, Mamma!” he muttered disgustedly. “This is sure a sarcastic
layout; dope enough here to cure all the sickness in Montana–if a
fellow knew enough to use it–battering a hole in my leg you could
throw a yearling calf into, and me wandering wild over the hills like a
locoed sheepherder! Glory, you get a move on yuh, you knock-kneed,
buzzard-headed–” He subsided into incoherent grumbling and rode back
whence he came, up the gully’s brim.

When the night was far gone and the slant of the Great Dipper told him
that day-dawn was near, he heard a horse nicker wistfully, away to the
right. Wheeling sharply, his spurs raking the roughened sides of
Glory, he rode recklessly toward the sound, not daring to hope that it
might be the pinto and yet holding his mind back from despair.

When he was near the place–so near that he could see a dim, formless
shape outlined against the sky-line,–Glory stumbled over a sunken rock
and fell heavily upon his knees. When he picked himself up he hobbled
and Weary cursed him unpityingly.

When, limping painfully, Glory came up with the object, the heart of
Weary rose up and stuck in his throat; for the object was a pinto horse
and above it bulked the squat figure of an irate old man.

“Hello, Dock,” greeted Weary. “How do yuh stack up?”

“Mon Dieu, Weary Davitson, I feex yous plandy. What for do you dees
t’ing? I not do de harrm wis you. I not got de mooney wort’ all dees
troubles what you makes. Dees horse, she lak for keel me also. She
buck, en keeck, en roon–mon Dieu, I not like dees t’ing.”

“Sober, by thunder!” ejaculated Weary in an ecstatic half-whisper.
“Dock, you’ve got a chance to make a record for yourself to-night–if
we ain’t too late,” he added bodefully. “Do yuh know where we’re
headed for?”

“I t’ink for de devil,” retorted Old Dock peevishly.

“No sir, we aren’t. We’re going straight to camp, and you’re going to
save old Patsy–you like Patsy, you know; many’s the time you’ve tanked
up together and then fell on each other’s necks and wept because the
good old times won’t come again. He got poisoned on canned corn; the
Lord send he ain’t too dead for you to cure him. Come on–we better
hit the breeze. We’ve lost a heap uh time.”

“I not like dees rope; she not comforte. I have ride de bad horse when
you wass in cradle.”

Weary got down and went over to him. “All right, I’ll unwind yuh.
When we started, yuh know, yuh couldn’t uh rode a rocking chair. I was
plumb obliged to tie yuh on. Think we’ll be in time to help Patsy? He
was taken sick about four o’clock.”

Old Dock waited till he was untied and the remnant of bridle-rein was
placed in his hand, before he answered ironically: “I not do de mageec,
mon cher Weary. I mos’ have de medicine or I can do nottings, I not
wave de fingaire an’ say de vord.”

“That’s all right–I’ve got the whole works. I broke into your shack
and made a clean haul uh dope. And I want to tell yuh that for a
doctor you’ve got blame poor ventilation to your house. But I found
the medicine.”

“Mon Dieu!” was the astonished comment, and after that they rode in
silence and such haste as Glory’s lameness would permit.

The first beams of the sun were touching redly the hilltops and the
birds were singing from swaying weeds when they rode down the last
slope into the valley where camped the Flying-U.

The night-hawk had driven the horses into the rope-corral and men were
inside watching, with spread loop, for a chance to throw. Happy Jack,
with the cook’s apron tied tightly around his lank middle, stood
despondently in the doorway of the mess-tent and said no word as they
approached. In his silence–in his very presence there–Weary read
disaster.

“I guess we’re too late,” he told Dock, in hushed tones; for the minute
he hated the white-bearded old man whose drunkenness had cost the
Flying-U so dear. He slipped wearily from the saddle and let the reins
drop to the ground. Happy Jack still eyed them silently.

“Well?” asked Weary, when his nerves would bear no more.

“When I git sick,” said Happy Jack, his voice heavy with reproach,
“I’ll send you for help–if I want to die.”

“Is he dead?” questioned Weary, in hopeless fashion.

“Well,” said Happy Jack deliberately, “no, he ain’t dead yet–but it’s
no thanks to you. Was it poker, or billiards? and who won?”

Weary looked at him dully a moment before he comprehended. He had not
had any supper or any deep, and he had ridden many miles in the long
hours he had been away. He walked, with a pronounced limp on the leg
which had been next the medicine-case, to where Dock stood leaning
shakily against the pinto.

“Maybe we’re in time, after all,” he said slowly. “Here’s some kind uh
dried stuff I got off the ceiling; I thought maybe yuh might need
it–you’re great on Indian weeds.” He pulled a crumpled, faintly
aromatic bundle of herbs from his pocket.

Dock took it and sniffed disgustedly, and dropped the herbs
contemptuously to the ground. “Dat not wort’ notting–she what you
call–de–catneep.” He smiled sourly.

Weary cast a furtive glance at Happy Jack, and hoped he had not
overheard. Catnip! Still, how could he be expected to know what the
blamed stuff was? He untied the black medicine-case and brought it and
put it at the feet of Old Dock. “Well, here’s the joker, anyhow,” he
said. “It like to wore a hole clear through my leg, but I was careful
and I don’t believe any uh the bottles are busted.”

Dock looked at it and sat heavily down upon a box. He looked at the
case queerly, then lifted his shaggy head to gaze up at Weary. And
behind the bleared gravity of his eyes was something very like a
twinkle. “Dis, she not cure seek mans, neider. She–” He pressed a
tiny spring which Weary had not discovered and laid the case open upon
the ground. “You see?” he said plaintively. “She not good for
Patsy–she tree-dossen can-openaire.”

Weary stared blankly. Happy Jack came up, looked and doubled
convulsively. Can-openers! Three dozen of them. Old Dock was
explaining in his best English, and he was courteously refraining from
the faintest smile.

“Dey de new, bettaire kind. I send for dem, I t’ink maybe I sell. I
put her in de grip–so–I carry dem all togedder. My mediceen, she in
de beeg ches’.”

Weary had sat down and his head was dropped dejectedly into his hands.
He had bungled the whole thing, after all. “Well,” he said
apathetically. “The chest was locked; I never opened it.”

Old Dock nodded his head gravely. “She lock,” he assented, gently.
“She mooch mediceen–she wort’ mooch mooney. De key, she in mine
pocket–” “Oh, I don’t give a damn where the key is–now,” flared
Weary. “I guess Patsy’ll have to cash in; that’s all.”

“Aw, gwan!” cried Happy Jack. “A sheepman come along just after you
left, and he had a quart uh whisky. We begged it off him and give
Patsy a good bit jolt. That eased him up some, and we give him
another–and he got to hollerin’ so loud for more uh the same, so we
just set the bottle in easy reach and let him alone. He’s in there
now, drunk as a biled owl–the lazy old devil. I had to get supper and
breakfast too–and looks like I’d have to cook dinner. Poison–hell!
I betche he never had nothing but a plain old belly-ache!”

Weary got up and went to the mess-tent, lifted the flap and looked in
upon Patsy lying on the flat of his back, snoring comfortably. He
regarded him silently a moment, then looked over his shoulder to where
Old Dock huddled over the three dozen can-openers.

“Oh, mamma!” he whispered, and poured himself a cup of coffee.