LITMIR.BIZ

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Weary was borne to the floor, bound hand and foot with silk handkerchiefs, carried bodily and laid upon his bed.

      “Oh, the things I won’t do to you for this!” he asserted, darkly. “There won’t nary a son-of-a-gun uh yuh get a dance from my little schoolma’am—you’ll see!” He grinned prophetically, closed his eyes and murmured: “Call me early, mother dear,” and straightway fell away into slumber and peaceful snoring, while the lather dried upon his face.

      “Better turn Weary loose and wake him up, Chip,” suggested Jack Bates, half an hour later, shoving the stopper into his cologne bottle and making for the door. “At the rate the rigs are rolling in, it’ll take us all to put up the teams.” The door slammed behind him as it had done behind the others as they hurried away.

      “Here!” Chip untied Weary’s hands and feet and took him by the shoulder. “Wake up, Willie, if you want to be Queen o’ the May.”

      Weary sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Confound them two Jacks! What time is it?”

      “A little after eight. YOUR crowd hasn’t, come yet, so you needn’t worry. I’m not going up yet for a while, myself.”

      “You’re off your feed. Brace up and take all there is going, my son.” Weary prepared to finish his interrupted beautification.

      “I’m going to—all the bottles, that is. If that Dry Lake gang comes loaded down with whisky, like they generally do, we ought to get hold of it and cache every drop, Weary.”

      Weary turned clear around to stare his astonishment.

      “When did the W. C. T. U. get you by the collar?” he demanded.

      “Aw, don’t be a fool, Weary,” retorted Chip. “You can see it wouldn’t look right for us to let any of the boys get full, or even half shot, seeing this is the Little Doctor’s dance.”

      Weary meditatively scraped his left jaw and wiped the lather from the razor upon a fragment of newspaper.

      “Splinter, we’ve throwed in together ever since we drifted onto the same range, and I’m with you, uh course. But—don’t overlook Dr. Cecil Granthum. I’d hate like the devil to see you git throwed down, because it’d hurt you worse than anybody I know.”

      Chip calmly sifted some tobacco into a cigarette paper. His mouth was very straight and his brows very close together.

      “It’s a devilish good thing it was YOU said that, Weary. If it had been anyone else I’d punch his face for him.”

      “Why, yes—an’ I’d help you, too.” Weary, his mouth very much on one side of his face that he might the easier shave the other, spoke in fragments. “You don’t take it amiss from—me, though. I can see—”

      The door slammed with extreme violence, and Weary slashed his chin unbecomingly in consequence, but he felt no resentment toward Chip. He calmly stuck a bit of paper on the cut to stop the bleeding and continued to shave.

      A short time after, the Little Doctor came across Chip glaring at Dick Brown, who was strumming his guitar with ostentatious ease upon an inverted dry-goods box at one end of the long dining room.

      “I came to ask a favor of you,” she said, “but my courage oozed at the first glance.”

      “It’s hard to believe your courage would ooze at anything. What’s the favor?”

      The Little Doctor bent her head and lowered her voice to a confidential undertone which caught at Chip’s blood and set it leaping.

      “I want you to come and help me turn my drug store around with its face to the wall. All the later editions of Denson, Pilgreen and Beckman have taken possession of my office—and as the Countess says: ‘Them Beckman kids is holy terrors—an’ it’s savin’ the rod an’ spoilin’ the kid that makes ‘em so!’”

      Chip laughed outright. “The Denson kids are a heap worse, if she only knew it,” he said, and followed her willingly.

      The Little Doctor’s “office” was a homey little room, with a couch, a well-worn Morris rocker, two willow chairs and a small table for the not imposing furnishing, dignified by a formidable stack of medical books in one corner, and the “drug store,” which was simply a roomy bookcase filled with jars, bottles, boxes and packages, all labeled in a neat vertical hand.

      The room fairly swarmed with children, who seemed, for the most part, to be enjoying themselves very much. Charlotte May Pilgreen and Sary Denson were hunched amicably over one of the books, shuddering beatifically over a pictured skeleton. A swarm surrounded the drug store, the glass door of which stood open.

      The Little Doctor flew across to the group, horror white.

      “Sybilly got the key an’ unlocked it, an’ she give us this candy, too!” tattled a Pilgreen with very red hair and a very snub nose.

      “I didn’t, either! It was Jos’phine!”

      “Aw, you big story-teller! I never tetched it!”

      The Little Doctor clutched the nearest arm till the owner of it squealed.

      “How many of you have eaten some of these? Tell the truth, now.” They quailed before her sternness—quailed and confessed. All told, seven had swallowed the sweet pellets, in numbers ranging from two to a dozen more.

      “Is it poison?” Chip whispered the question in the ear of the perturbed Little Doctor.

      “No—but it will make them exceedingly uncomfortable for a time—I’m going to pump them out.”

      “Good shot! Serves ‘em right, the little—”

      “All of you who have eaten this—er—candy, must come with me. The rest of you may stay here and play, but you must NOT touch this case.”

      “Yuh going t’ give ‘em a lickin’?” Sary Denson wetted a finger copiously before turning a leaf upon the beautiful skeleton.

      “Never mind what I’m going to do to them—you had better keep out of mischief yourself, however. Mr. Bennett, I wish you would get some fellow you can trust—some one who won’t talk about this afterward—turn this case around so that it will be safe, and then come to the back bedroom—the one off the kitchen. And tell Louise I want her, will you, please?”

      “I’ll get old Weary. Yes, I’ll send the Countess—but don’t you think she’s a mighty poor hand to keep a secret?”

      “I can’t help it—I need her. Hurry, please.”

      Awed by the look in her big, gray eyes and the mysterious summoning of help, the luckless seven were marched silently through the outer door, around the house, through the coal shed and so into the back bedroom, without being observed by the merrymakers, who shook the house to its foundation to the cheerful command: “Gran’ right ‘n’ left with a double ELBOW-W!” “Chasse by yer pardner—balance—SWING!”

      “What under the shinin’ sun’s the matter, Dell?” The Countess, breathless from dancing, burst in upon the little group.

      “Nothing very serious, Louise, though it’s rather uncomfortable to be called from dancing to administer heroic remedies by wholesale. Can you hold Josephine—whichever one that is? She ate the most, as nearly as I can find out.”

      “She ain’t gone an’ took pizen, has she? What was it—strychnine? I’ll bet them Beckman kids put ‘er up to it. Yuh goin’ t’ give ‘er an anticdote?”

      “I’m going to use this.” The Little Doctor held up a fearsome thing to view. “Open your mouth, Josephine.”

      Josephine refused; her refusal was emphatic and unequivocal, punctuated by sundry kicks directed at whoever came within range of her stout little shoes.

      “It ain’t no use t’ call Mary in—Mary can’t handle her no better’n I can—an’ not so good. Jos’phine,

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