They pulled him then into a more comfortable position where the sun shone warmly and stood around him in a crude circle and watched for more pronounced symptoms of recovery, and sent word to the Kid that his string was going to be all right in a little while.
The information was lost upon the Kid, who wept hysterically in his Daddy Chip’s arms listen to anything they told him. He had seen Silver stretched out dead, with his back in the edge of the creek and his feet sprawled at horrible angles, and the sight obsessed him and forbade comfort. He had killed his string; nothing was clear in his mind save that, and he screamed with his face hidden from his little world.
The Little Doctor, with anxious eyes and puckered eyebrows, poured something into a teaspoon and helped Chip fight to get it down the Kid’s throat. And the Kid shrieked and struggled and strangled, as is the way of kids the world over, and tried to spit out the stuff and couldn’t, so he screamed the louder and held his breath until he was purple, and his parents were scared stiff. The Old Man hobbled to the door in the midst of the uproar and asked them acrimoniously why they didn’t make that doggoned Kid stop his howling; and when Chip, his nerves already strained to the snapping point, told him bluntly to get out and mind his own business, he hobbled away again muttering anathemas against the whole outfit.
The Countess rushed in from out of doors and wanted to know what under the shinin’ sun was the matter with that kid, and advised his frantic parents to throw water in his face. Chip told her exactly what he had told the Old Man, in exactly the same tone; so the Countess retreated, declaring that he wouldn’t be let to act that way if he was her kid, and that he was plumb everlastingly spoiled.
The Happy Family heard the disturbance and thought the Kid was being spanked for the accident, which put every man of them in a fighting humor toward Chip, the Little Doctor, the Old Man and the whole world. Pink even meditated going up to the White House to lick Chip—or at least tell him what he thought of him—and he had plenty of sympathizers; though they advised him half-heartedly not to buy in to any family mixup.
It was into this storm centre that Andy Green rode headlong with his own burden of threatened disaster.
Chapter 4. Andy Takes a Hand in the Game
Andy Green was a day late in arriving at the Flying U. First he lost time by leaving the train thirty miles short of the destination marked on his ticket, and when he did resume his journey on the next train, he traveled eighty-four miles beyond Dry Lake, which landed him in Great Falls in the early morning. There, with the caution of a criminal carefully avoiding a meeting with Miss Hallman, he spent an hour in poring over a plat of a certain section of Chouteau County, and in copying certain description of unoccupied land.
He had not slept very well the night before and he looked it. He had cogitated upon the subject of land speculations and the welfare of his outfit until his head was one great, dull ache; but he stuck to his determination to do something to block the game of the Homeseekers’ Syndicate. Just what that something would be he had not yet decided. But on general principles it seemed wise to learn all he could concerning the particular tract of land about which Florence Grace Hallman had talked.
The day was past when range rights might be defended honorably with rifles and six-shooters and iron nerved men to use them—and I fear that Andy Green sighed because it was so. Give him the “bunch” and free swing, and he thought the Homeseekers would lose their enthusiasm before even the first hot wind blew up from the southwest to wither their crops. But such measures were not to be thought of; if they fought at all they must fight with the law behind them—and even Andy’s optimism did not see much hope from the law; none, in fact, since both the law and the moneyed powers were eager for the coming of homebuilders into that wide land. All up along the Marias they had built their board shacks, and back over the benches as far as one could see. There was nothing to stop them, everything to make their coming easy.
Andy scowled at the plat he was studying, and admitted to himself that it looked as though the Home Seekers’ Syndicate were going to have things their own way; unless—There he stuck. There must be some way out; never in his life had he faced a situation which had been absolutely hopeless; always there had been some chance to win, if a man only saw it in time and took it. In this case it was the clerk in the office who pointed the way with an idle remark.
“Going to take up a claim, are you?”
Andy looked up at him with the blank stare of preoccupation, and changed expression as the question filtered into his brain and fitted somehow into the puzzle. He grinned, said maybe he would, folded the sheet of paper filled with what looked like a meaningless jumble of letters and figures, bought a plat of that township and begged some government pamphlets, and went out humming a little tune just above a whisper. At the door he tilted his hat down at an angle over his right eye and took long, eager steps toward an obscure hotel and his meagre baggage.
There was no train going east until midnight, and he caught that train. This time he actually got off at Dry Lake, ate a hurried breakfast, got his horse out of the livery stable and dug up the dust of the lane with rapid hoof-beats so that he rode all the way to the first hill followed by a rolling, gray cloud that never quite caught him.
When he rode down the Hog’s Back he saw the Happy Family bunched around some object on the creek-bank, and he heard the hysterical screaming of the Kid up in the house, and saw the Old Man limping excitedly up and down the porch. A man less astute than Andy Green would have known that some thing had happened. He hurried down the last slope, galloped along the creek-bottom, crossed the ford in a couple of leaps and pulled up beside the group that surrounded Silver.
“What’s been taking place here?” he demanded curiously, skipping the usual greetings.
“Hell,” said the Native Son succinctly, glancing up at him.
“Old Silver looked over the fence into Kingdom Come,” Weary enlarged the statement a little. “Tried to take a drink with a nose bag on. I guess he’ll come through all right.”
“What ails the Kid?” Andy demanded, glancing toward the house whence issued a fresh outburst of shrieks.
The Happy Family looked at one another and then at the White House.
“Aw, some folks hain’t got a lick of sense when it comes to kids,” Big Medicine accused gruffly.
“The Kid,” Weary explained, “put the nose bag on Silver and then left the stable door open.”
“They ain’t—spanking him for it, are they?” Andy demanded belligerently. “By gracious, how’d a kid know any better? Little bit of a tad like that—”
“Aw, they don’t never spank the Kid!” Slim defended the parents loyally. “By golly, they’s been times when I would-a spanked him, if it’d been me. Countess says it’s plumb ridiculous the way that Kid runs over ‘em—rough shod. If he’s gittin’ spanked now, it’s the first time.”
“Well,” said Andy, looking from one to another and reverting to his own worry as he swung down from his sweating horse, “there’s something worse than a spanked kid going to happen to this outfit if you fellows don’t get busy and do something. There’s a swarm of dry-farmers coming in on us, with their stock to eat up the grass and their darned fences shutting off the water—”
“Oh, for the Lord’s sake, cut it out!” snapped Pink. “We ain’t in the mood for any of your joshes. We’ve had about enough excitement for once.”
“Ah, don’t be a damn’ fool,” Andy snapped back. “There’s no josh about it. I’ve got the whole scheme, just as they framed it up in Minneapolis. I got to talking with a she-agent on the train, and