“Yes; I’d give a good deal if I could walk as well as he can,” said Chip, gloomily.
“He wasn’t hurt as badly as you were. You ought to be thankful you can walk at all, and that you won’t limp all your life. I was afraid for a while, just at first—”
“You were? Why didn’t you tell me?” Chip’s eyes were fixed sternly upon her.
“Because I didn’t want to. It would only have made matters worse, anyway. And you won’t limp, you know, if you’re careful for a while longer. I’m going to get Silver his sugar. He has sugar every day.”
Silver lifted his head and looked after her inquiringly, whinnied complainingly, and prepared to follow as best he could.
“Silver—oh, Silver!” Chip snapped his fingers to attract his attention. “Hang the luck, come back here! Would you throw down your best friend for that girl? Has she got to have you, too?” His voice grew wistfully rebellious. “You’re mine. Come back here, you little fool—she doesn’t care.”
Silver stopped at the corner, swung his head and looked back at Chip, beckoning, coaxing, swearing under his breath. His eyes sought for sign of his goddess, who had disappeared most mysteriously. Throwing up his head, he sent a protest shrilling through the air, and looked no more at Chip.
“I’m coming, now be still. Oh, don’t you dare paw with your lame leg! Why didn’t you stay with your master?”
“He’s no use for his master, any more,” said Chip, with a hurt laugh. “A woman always does play the—mischief, somehow. I wonder why? They look innocent enough.”
“Wait till your turn comes, and perhaps you’ll learn why,” retorted she.
Chip, knowing that his turn had come, and come to tarry, found nothing to say.
“Beside,” continued the Little Doctor, “Silver didn’t want me so much— it was the sugar. I hope you aren’t jealous of me, because I know his heart is big enough to hold us both.”
She stayed a long half hour, and was so gay that it seemed like old times to listen to her laugh and watch her dimples while she talked. Chip forgot that he had a quarrel with fate, and he also forgot Dr. Cecil Granthum, of Gilroy, Ohio—until Slim rode up and handed the Little Doctor a letter addressed in that bold, up-and-down writing that Chip considered a little the ugliest specimen of chirography he had ever seen in his life.
“It’s from Cecil,” said the Little Doctor, simply and unnecessarily, and led Silver back down the hill.
Chip, gazing at that tiresome bluff across the coulee, renewed his quarrel with fate.
CHAPTER XV
The Spoils of Victory
“I wish, while I’m gone, you’d paint me another picture. Will you, please?”
When a girl has big, gray eyes that half convince you they are not gray at all, but brown, or blue, at times, and a way of using them that makes a fellow heady, like champagne, and a couple of dimples that will dodge into her cheeks just when a fellow is least prepared to resist them—why, what can a fellow do but knuckle under and say yes, especially when she lets her head tip to one side a little and says “please” like that?
Chip tried not to look at her, but he couldn’t help himself very well while she stood directly in front of him. He compromised weakly instead of refusing point-blank, as he told himself he wanted to do.
“I don’t know—maybe I can’t, again.”
“Maybe you can, though. Here’s an eighteen by twenty-four canvas, and here are all the paints I have in the house, and the brushes. I’ll expect to see something worth while, when I return.”
“Well, but if I can’t—”
“Look here. Straight in the eye, if you please! Now, will you try?”
Chip, looking into her eyes that were laughing, but with a certain earnestness behind the laugh, threw up his hands—mentally, you know.
“Yes, I’ll try. How long are you going to be gone?”
“Oh, perhaps a week,” she said, lightly, and Chip’s heart went heavy.
“You may paint any kind of picture you like, but I’d rather you did something like ‘The Last Stand’—only better. And put your brand, as you call it, in one corner.”
“You won’t sell it, will you?” The words slipped out before he knew.
“No—no, I won’t sell it, for it won’t be mine. It’s for yourself this time.”
“Then there won’t be any picture,” said Chip, shortly.
“Oh, yes, there will,” smiled the Little Doctor, sweetly, and went away before he could contradict her.
Perhaps a week! Heavens, that was seven days, and every day had at least sixteen waking hours. How would it be when it was years, then? When Dr. Cecil Granthum—(er—no, I won’t. The invective attached to that gentleman’s name was something not to be repeated here.) At any rate, a week was a long, long time to put in without any gray eyes or any laugh, or any dimples, or, in short, without the Little Doctor. He could not see, for his part, why she wanted to go gadding off to the Falls with Len Adams and the schoolma’am, anyway. Couldn’t they get along without her? They always had, before she came to the country; but, for that matter, so had he. The problem was, how was he going to get along without her for the rest of his life? What did they want to stay a week for? Couldn’t they buy everything they wanted in a day or so? And the Giant Spring wasn’t such great shakes, nor the Rainbow Falls, that they need to hang around town a week just to look at them. And the picture—what was he such a fool for? Couldn’t he say no with a pair of gray eyes staring into his? It seemed not. He supposed he must think up something to daub on there—the poorer the better.
That first day Chip smoked something like two dozen cigarettes, gazed out across the coulee till his eyes ached, glared morosely at the canvas on the easel, which stared back at him till the dull blankness of it stamped itself upon his brain and he could see nothing else, look where he might. Whereupon he gathered up hat and crutches, and hobbled slowly down the hill to tell Silver his troubles.
The second day threatened to be like the first. Chip sat by the window and smoked; but, little by little, the smoke took form and substance until, when he turned his eyes to the easel, a picture looked back at him—even though to other eyes the canvas was yet blank and waiting.
There was no Johnny this time to run at his beckoning. He limped about on his crutches, collected all things needful, and sat down to work.
As he sketched and painted, with a characteristic rapidity that was impatient of the slightest interruption yet patient in its perfectness of detail, the picture born of the smoke grew steadily upon the canvas.
It seemed, at first, that “The Last Stand” was to be repeated. There were the same jagged pinnacles and scrubby pines, held in the fierce grip of the frozen chinook. The same? But there was a difference, not to be explained, perhaps, but certainly to be felt. The Little Doctor’s hills were jagged, barren hills; her pines were very nice pines indeed. Chip’s hills were jagged, they were barren—they—were desolate; his pines were shuddering, lonely pines; for he had wandered alone among them and had caught the Message of the Wilderness. His sky was the cold, sinister sky of “The Last Stand”—but it was colder, more sinister, for it was night. A young moon hung low in the west, its face half hidden behind a rift of scurrying snow clouds. The tiny basin was shadowy and vague, the cut-bank a black wall touched here and there by a quivering shaft of light.
There was no threatening cow with lowered horns and watchful eye; there was no panic-stricken calf to whip up her flagging courage with its trust in her.
The wolves? Yes, there were the wolves—but there were more of them. They were not sitting in a waiting