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 tonight, 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