a brother. Lady Luck, in Andy Green’s opinion, might nearly always be depended upon to play him for a favorite.
“Yuh know, Cal, my brain has been turning somersaults trying to scheme some way to get a lovely bunch of red loco over to the ranch to-day,” he confided. With one arm thrown affectionately over the neck of Cal’s horse and with his hat pushed back from his forehead, Andy looked innocent and earnest as a school-boy.
“Red loco?”
“Yeah. Bert’s cousin’s here on a visit from the East. You haven’t seen her yet. Prettiest red hair you ever saw in your life. Complexion like rose leaves floatin’ in sweet cream. Eyes—”
“Hull-ee gee!” Cal’s eyes rounded into the baby stare his fellows knew of old. “You wanta drift clean over the ridge, old-timer. If yuh mean Myrt Forsyth, I know that bunch of poison weed to a fare-ye-well.”
“That’s her name. But man, oh, man! She sure ain’t poison to me!” Andy looked as if he meant it. “Now I’ll get to ride with her to the ranch. She can watch me tame a bronk. With them blue eyes of hers looking down from the top rail—man, I can gentle chain lightning till you can roll it up like barb wire!”
“Loco is right,” observed Cal sententiously. “You’ve got it in your system and there’s only one cure ’t I know of.” He grinned, and added in response to Andy’s questioning look, “Go on till you get your belly full. If it don’t kill yuh, you’re cured.”
“That’s the kinda medicine I’m crying for,” Andy declared boldly. “But what’s eatin’ on you, Cal? She says she was out here, awhile back. Did you fall for that little gal yourself and get turned down?”
“Never you mind what I done. Get a move on. The boys was hopin’ you’d show up to-day—they’ve got a horse or two picked out for you to ride. Nice easy ones. You better git over there before they frame something on yuh.” Cal turned away then to shake hands with a fragile-looking young woman with shining red hair waving distractingly around her Dresden china brow, and long, heavy-lidded blue eyes whose briefest glance was calculated to raise a man’s pulse at least ten beats a minute.
“Cal!” she breathed, laying her free hand over his. “You, of all people!”
“Same to you, Myrt,” Cal smiled down at her. “I sure never expected to see you this morning.”
Andy Green watched the two with narrowed eyes. That hand clasp was too significant, their fingers loosened too reluctantly to please him. It seemed to hint vaguely at past tenderness which might flare up again with the slightest encouragement. Andy did not like it. No one at the Flying U had ever mentioned Bert Rogers’ cousin. Knowing the Happy Family, it certainly was queer that none of the boys had ever joshed Cal about her. They did whenever he looked at a girl—why not Myrtle Forsyth?
The mystery nagged at Andy. The ride to Flying U Coulee was not what he had hoped for. Cal and Myrtle kept harking back to her first visit in a way that made him an outsider. After a wonderful evening with her, sitting in the bay window of the Rogers house watching the storm, with Myrtle squealing and clutching his arm whenever there came a flash of lightning, it did not look right to him that she should be all eyes for Cal this morning.
Though it might not be polite to “horn in” on their conversation, Andy owned a little streak of stubbornness. He would not let them pair off by themselves as he suspected they would do at the first chance, but rode right with them and broke in with questions about the boys and the ranch and all that had happened since he had left ten days before. Not that he was so darned anxious to know; he’d get the news soon enough from the boys. But when Cal was answering his questions, he couldn’t talk to Myrtle and gaze into those blue eyes of hers.
The trick served its purpose for the time being, and they heard all about Big Medicine’s adventure. But that only gave Andy a new grievance. Myrt Forsyth sure wasted a lot of sympathy on the stranger; more than he had coming to him. All right to be sorry—but she needn’t have called him “that poor, poor boy” so often. The one cheerful note was that Cal was getting sore about it too.
For this reason Andy Green was not in his normal sunny humor when he left the two at the corral where the Happy Family were foregathered and rode on up to the White House with a letter for the Countess which was marked “Important, Rush!” in the Little Doctor’s well-known handwriting.
“Keep away from that horse’s heels,” he paused to admonish a small Pilgreen child, who ran down the steps as he was about to enter the kitchen. “He’ll lam your head off!”
“I wanta ride! Can I have a ride?” Two other young Pilgreens were converging upon the horse.
“No, you can’t. Keep away, now. He’ll take an ear off you in a minute.” Scowling, Andy waited until they had withdrawn a little, then walked inside. The Countess rose from looking into her oven, gave him a harassed frown and beckoned him into her immaculate pantry.
“What under the shinin’ sun am I goin’ to do with them kids?” she demanded accusingly. “They’ve been here an hour, and I’d ruther have the locusts of Egypt devourin’ the land.”
“I dunno. What did Moses do with the locusts?” Andy looked up from searching for the Little Doctor’s letter among a conglomeration of papers such as men carry for no reason whatever in their inside coat pockets.
“I’m a Christian woman, but if I don’t feed them kids poison fly paper before the day’s over—”
“Think it would work?” Andy grinned and returned to his search. In his present mood he could sympathize with the Countess as never before.
“Something’s got to. You’re so good at thinkin’ up tricks, I should think you could do something. That old woman’ll drive me to murder, if the kids don’t.” She listened through the closed door, heard the crash of falling tin-ware in the kitchen and gave Andy one desperate look as she rushed out. Having found the letter he was seeking, Andy helped himself to a doughnut from a two-gallon stone jar and went out, taking large bites.
“Gimme a doughnut. I wanta doughnut! Maw, can’t I have a doughnut?”
Andy ate fast, moving forward in the midst of beseeching young Pilgreens. As the last crisp morsel disappeared down his throat, he reached the Countess. Through the open doorway Mrs. Pilgreen could be seen in the living room, solemnly rocking, with her hands folded in unaccustomed idleness across her starched white apron. Andy gave her one swift, appraising look. An overworked ranch woman on a Sunday visit is pretty hard to dislodge, as he had long ago learned from observation, but there was something in her personality that grated on his nerves. He turned to the Countess and said, in a voice pitched to carry above the clamor of young voices:
“Here’s a letter from Mrs. Chip. Somebody ought to telegraph Chip not to bring her and the kid home yet. With smallpox on the ranch—”
In the living room Mrs. Pilgreen had stopped rocking. The Countess gasped, caught Andy’s look and nodded.
“I don’t know what under the shinin’ sun we’re goin’ to do,” she complained fretfully. “D’ you s’pose that pore feller they brought in last night—”
“It’s a wonder he ever got this far. They’re all stirred up over it in town. Worst case—”
There was a swish of starched calico, and Mrs. Pilgreen stood glaring in the doorway.
