“Not against neighbors—no.” Blake uncrossed his perfectly trousered legs and crossed them the other way, after carefully avoiding any bagging tendency. “But this syndicate—or these contestants—will try to prove that you are not a neighbor only, but a—backer of the boys in a land-grabbing scheme. To avoid—”
“Well, doggone your measly hide, Blake, I’ve told you fifty times I ain’t!” The Old Man sat forward in his chair and shook his fist unabashed at his guest. “Them boys cooked that all up amongst themselves, and went and filed on that land before ever I knowed a thing about it. How can yuh set there and say I backed ‘em? And that blonde Jezebel—riding down here bold as brass and turnin’ up her nose at Dell, and callin’ me a conspirator to my face!”
“I sticked a pin in her saddle blanket, Uncle Gee-gee. I’ll bet she wished she’d stayed away from here when her horse bucked her off.” The Kid looked up from trying to tie a piece of paper to the end of a brindle kitten’s switching tail, and smiled his adorable smile—that had a gap in the middle.
“Hey? You leave that cat alone or he’ll scratch yuh. Blake, if you can’t see—”
“He! He’s a her and her name’s Adeline. Where’s the boys, Uncle Gee-gee?”
“Hey? Oh, away down in the breaks after their cattle that got away. You keep still and never mind where they’ve gone.” His mind swung back to the Happy Family, combing the breaks for their stock and the stock of the nesters, with an average of one saddle-horse apiece and a camp outfit of the most primitive sort—if they had any at all, which he doubted. The Old Man had eased too many roundups through that rough country not to realize keenly the difficulties of the Happy Family.
“They need horses,” he groaned to Blake, “and they need help. If you knowed the country and the work as well as I do you’d know they’ve got to have horses and help. And there’s their claims—fellers squatting down on every eighty—four different nesters fer every doggoned one of the bunch to handle! And you tell me I got to set here and not lift a hand. You tell me I can’t put men to work on that fence they want built. You tell me I can’t lend ‘em so much as a horse!”
Blake nodded. “I tell you that, and I emphasize it,” he assured the other, brushing off another half inch of ash from his cigar. “If you want to help those boys hold their land, you must not move a finger.”
“He’s wiggling all of ‘em!” accused the Kid sternly, and pointed to the Old Man drumming irritatedly upon his chair arms. “He don’t want to help the boys, but I do. I’ll help ‘em get their cattle, Mr. Blake. I’m one of the bunch anyway. I’ll lend ‘em my string.”
“You’ve been told before not to butt in to grownup talk,” his uncle reproved him irascibly. “Now you cut it out. And take that string off’n that cat!” he added harshly. “Dell! Come and look after this kid! Doggone it, a man can’t talk five minutes—”
The Kid giggled irrepressibly. “That’s one on you, old man. You saw Doctor Dell go away a long time ago. Think she can hear yuh when she’s away up on the bench?”
“You go on off and play!” commanded the Old Man. “I dunno what yuh want to pester a feller to death for—and say! Take that string off’n that cat!”
“Aw gwan! It ain’t hurting the cat. She likes it.” He lifted the kitten and squeezed her till she yowled. “See? She said yes, she likes it.”
The Old Man returned to the trials of the Happy Family, and the Kid sat and listened, with the brindle kitten snuggled uncomfortably, head downward in his arms.
The Kid had heard a good deal, lately, about the trials of his beloved “bunch.” About the “nesters” who brought cattle in to eat up the grass that belonged to the cattle of the bunch. The Kid understood that perfectly—since he had been raised in the atmosphere of range talk. He had heard about the men building shacks on the claims of the Happy Family—he understood that also; for he had seen the shacks himself, and he had seen where there had been slid down hill into the bottom of Antelope Coulee. He knew all about the attack on Patsy’s cabin and how the Happy Family had been fooled, and the cattle driven off and scattered. The breaks—he was a bit hazy upon the subject of breaks. He had heard about them all his life. The stock got amongst them and had to be hunted out. He thought—as nearly as could be put in words—that it must be a place where all the brakes grow that are used on wagons and buggies. These were of wood, therefore they must grow somewhere. They grew where the Happy Family went sometimes, when they were gone for days and days after stock. They were down there now—it was down in the breaks, always—and they couldn’t round up their cattle because they hadn’t horses enough. They needed help, so they could hurry back and slide those other shacks off their claims and into Antelope Coulee where they had slid the others. On the whole, the Kid had a very fair conception of the state of affairs. Claimants and contestants—those words went over his head. But he knew perfectly well that the nesters were the men that didn’t like the Happy Family, and lived in shacks on the way to town, and plowed big patches of prairie and had children that went barefooted in the furrows and couldn’t ride horses to save their lives. Pilgrim kids, that didn’t know what “chaps” were—he had talked with a few when he went with Doctor Dell and Daddy Chip to see the sick lady.
After a while, when the Honorable Blake became the chief speaker and leaned forward and tapped the Old Man frequently on a knee with his finger, and used long words that carried no meaning, and said contestant and claimant and evidence so often that he became tiresome, the Kid slid off the porch and went away, his small face sober with deep meditations.
He would need some grub—maybe the bunch was hungry without any camp-wagons. The Kid had stood around in the way, many’s the time, and watched certain members of the Happy Family stuff emergency rations into flour sacks, and afterwards tie the sack to their saddles and ride off. He knew all about that, too.
He hunted up a flour sack that had not had all the string pulled out of it so it was no longer a sack but a dish-towel, and held it behind his back while he went cautiously to the kitchen door. The Countess was nowhere in sight—but it was just as well to make sure. The Kid went in, took a basin off the table, held it high and deliberately dropped it on the floor. It, made a loud bang, but it did not elicit any shrill protest from the Countess; therefore the Countess was nowhere around. The Kid went in boldly and filled his four-sack so full it dragged on the floor when he started off.
At the door he went down the steps ahead of the sack, and bent his small back from the third step and pulled the sack upon his shoulders. It wobbled a good deal, and the Kid came near falling sidewise off the last step before he could balance his burden. But he managed it, being the child of his parents and having a good deal of persistence in his makeup; and he went, by a roundabout way, to the stable with the grub-sack bending him double. Still it was not so very heavy; it was made bulky by about two dozen fresh-made doughnuts and a loaf of bread and a jar of honey and a glass of wild-currant jelly and a pound or so of raw, dried prunes which the Kid called nibblin’s because he liked to nibble at them, like a prairie dog at a grass root.
Getting that sack tied fast to the saddle after the saddle was on Silver’s back was no easy task for a boy who is six, even though he is large for his age. Still, being Chip’s Kid and the Little Doctor’s he did it—with the help of the oats box and Silver’s patient disposition.
There were other things which the bunch always tied on their saddles; a blanket, for instance, and a rope. The Kid made a trip to the bunk-house and pulled a gray blanket off Ole’s bed, and spent a quarter of an hour rolling it as he had seen the boys roll blankets The oats box, with Silver standing beside it, came in handy again. He found a discarded rope and after much labor coiled it crudely and tied it beside the saddle-fork.
The Kid went to the door, stood beside it and leaned away over so that he could peek out and not be seen Voices came from the house—the voice of the Old Man; to be exact, high-pitched and combative. The Kid looked up the bluff, and the trail lay empty in the afternoon sun. Still, he did not like to take that trail. Doctor Dell might