LITMIR.BIZ

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      Chip was rummaging after something in the store-house, and, when Andy saw him there, he dismounted and stood blotting out the light from the doorway. Chip looked up, said “Hello” carelessly, and flung an old slicker aside that he might search beneath it. “Back early, aren’t you?” he asked, for sake of saying something.

      Andy’s attitude was not as casual as he would have had it.

      “Say, maybe you better go on up to the house,” he began diffidently. “I guess your wife wants to see yuh, maybe.”

      “Just as a good wife should,” grinned Chip. “What’s the matter? Kid fall off the porch?”

      “N-o-o—I brought out a wire from Chicago. It’s from a doctor there—some hospital. The—Old Man got hurt. One of them cussed automobiles knocked him down. They want you to come.”

      Chip had straightened up and was hooking at Andy blankly. “If you’re just—”

      “Honest,” Andy asserted, and flushed a little. “I’ll go tell some one to catch up the team—you’ll want to make that 11:20, I take it.” He added, as Chip went by him hastily, “I had the agent wire for sleeper berths on the 11:20 so—”

      “Thanks. Yes, you have the team caught up, Andy.” Chip was already well on his way to the house.

      Andy waited till he saw the Little Doctor come hurriedly to the end of the porch overlooking the pathway, with the telegram fluttering in her fingers, and then led his horse down through the gate and to the stable. He yanked the saddle off, turned the tired animal into a stall, and went on to the corral, where he leaned elbows on a warped rail and peered through at the turmoil within. Close beside him stood Weary, with his loop dragging behind him, waiting for a chance to throw it over the head of a buckskin three-year-old with black mane and tail.

      “Get in here and make a hand, why don’t you?” Weary bantered, his eye on the buckskin. “Good chance to make a ‘rep’ for yourself, Andy. Gawd greased that buckskin—he sure can slide out from under a rope as easy—”

      He broke off to flip the hoop dexterously forward, had the reward of seeing the buckskin dodge backward, so that the rope barely flicked him on the nose, and drew in his rope disgustedly. “Come on, Andy—my hands are up in the air; I can’t land him—that’s the fourth throw.”

      Andy’s interest in the buckskin, however, was scant. His face was sober, his whole attitude one of extreme dejection.

      “You got the tummy-ache?” Pink inquired facetiously, moving around so that he got a fair look at his face.

      “Naw—his girl’s went back on him!” Happy Jack put in, coiling his rope as he came up.

      “Oh, shut up!” Andy’s voice was sharp with trouble. “Boys, the Old Man’s—well, he’s most likely dead by this time. I brought out a telegram—”

      “Go on!” Pink’s eyes widened incredulously. “Don’t you try that kind of a load, Andy Green, or I’ll just about—”

      “Oh, you fellows make me sick!” Andy took his elbows off the rail and stood straight. “Dammit, the telegram’s up at the house—go and read it yourselves, then!”

      The three stared after him doubtfully, fear struggling with the caution born of much experience.

      “He don’t act, to me, like he was putting up a josh,” Weary stated uneasily, after a minute of silence. “Run up to the house and find out, Cadwalloper. The Old Man—oh, good Lord!” The tan on Weary’s face took a lighter tinge. “Scoot—it won’t take but a minute to find out for sure. Go on, Pink.”

      “So help me Josephine, I’ll kill that same Andy Green if he’s lied about it,” Pink declared, while he climbed the fence.

      In three minutes he was back, and before he had said a word, his face confirmed the bad news. Their eyes besought him for details, and he gave them jerkily. “Automobile run over him. He ain’t dead, but they think—Chip and the Little Doctor are going to catch the night train. You go haze in the team, Happy. And give ‘em a feed of oats, Chip said.”

      Irish and Big Medicine, seeing the three standing soberly together there, and sensing something unusual, came up and heard the news in stunned silence. Andy, forgetting his pique at their first disbelief, came forlornly back and stood with them.

      The Old Man—the thing could not be true! To every man of them his presence, conjured by the impending tragedy, was almost a palpable thing. His stocky figure seemed almost to stand in their midst; he looked at them with his whimsical eyes, which had the radiating crows-feet of age, humor and habitual squinting against sun and wind; the bald spot on his head, the wrinkling shirt-collar that seldom knew a tie, the carpet slippers which were his favorite footgear because they were kind to his bunions, his husky voice, good-naturedly complaining, were poignantly real to them at that moment. Then Irish mentally pictured him lying maimed, dying, perhaps, in a far-off hospital among strangers, and swore.

      “If he’s got to die, it oughta be here, where folks know him and—where he knows—” Irish was not accustomed to giving voice to his deeper feelings, and he blundered awkwardly over it.

      “I never did go much on them darned hospitals, anyway,” Weary observed gloomily. “He oughta be home, where folks can look after him. Mam-ma! It sure is a fright.”

      “I betche Chip and the Little Doctor won’t get there in time,” Happy Jack predicted, with his usual pessimism. “The Old Man’s gittin’ old—”

      “He ain’t but fifty-two; yuh call that old, consarn yuh? He’s younger right now than you’ll be when you’re forty.”

      “Countess is going along, too, so she can ride herd on the Kid,” Pink informed then. “I heard the Little Doctor tell her to pack up, and ‘never mind if she did have sponge all set!’ Countess seemed to think her bread was a darned sight more important than the Old Man. That’s the way with women. They’ll pass up—”

      “Well, by golly, I like to see a woman take some interest in her own affairs,” Slim defended. “What they packin’ up for, and where they goin’?” Slim had just ridden up to the group in time to overhear Pink’s criticism.

      They told him the news, and Slim swallowed twice, said “By golly!” quite huskily, and then rode slowly away with his head bowed. He had worked for the Flying U when it was strictly a bachelor outfit, and with the tenacity of slow minds he held J. G. Whitmore, his beloved “Old Man,” as but a degree lower than that mysterious power which made the sun to shine—and, if the truth were known, he had accepted him as being quite as eternal. His loyalty adjusted everything to the interests of the Flying U. That the Old Man could die—the possibility stunned him.

      They were a sorry company that gathered that night around the long table with its mottled oil-cloth covering and benches polished to a glass-like smoothness with their own vigorous bodies. They did not talk much about the Old Man; indeed, they came no nearer the subject than to ask Weary if he were going to drive the team in to Dry Lake. They did not talk much about anything, for that matter; even the knives and forks seemed to share the general depression of spirits, and failed to give forth the cheerful clatter which was a daily accompaniment of meals in that room.

      Old Patsy, he who had cooked for J. G. Whitmore when the Flying U coulee was a wilderness and the brand yet unrecorded and the irons unmade—Patsy lumbered heavily about the room and could not find his dish-cloth when it was squeezed tight in one great, fat hand, and unthinkingly started to fill their coffee cups from the tea-kettle.

      “Py cosh, I vould keel der fool vot made her first von of der automo-beels, yet!” he exclaimed unexpectedly, after a long silence, and cast his pipe vindictively toward his bunk in one corner.

      The Happy Family looked around at him, then understandingly at one another.

      “Same here, Patsy,” Jack Bates agreed. “What they want of the damned things when the country’s full uh good horses gits

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