by B. M. Bower
“She says Bill would just love to come,” said the voice, with a bit of a laugh in it.
Chip, turning his head back suddenly, looked into the gray eyes and felt inexplicably cheered. He almost believed she understood something of what it all meant to him. And she mercifully refrained from spoken pity, which he felt he could not have borne just then. His lips took back some of their curve.
“You tell her I wouldn’t just love to have him,” he said, grimly.
“I’d never dare. She dotes on Bill. Whom do you want?”
“When it comes to that, I don’t want anybody. But if you could get Johnny Beckman to come—”
“Oh, I will—I’ll go myself, to make sure of him. Which one is Johnny?”
“Johnny’s the red-headed one,” said Chip.
“But—they’re all—”
“Yes, but his head is several shades redder than any of the others,” interrupted he, quite cheerfully.
The Little Doctor, observing the twinkle in his eyes, felt her spirits rise wonderfully. She could not bear that hurt, rebellious, lonely look which they had worn.
“I’ll bring him—but I may have to chloroform the Countess to get him into the house. You must try to sleep, while I’m gone—and don’t fret— will you? You’ll get well all the quicker for taking things easily.”
Chip smiled faintly at this wholesome advice, and the Little Doctor laid her hand shyly upon his forehead to test its temperature, drew down the shade over the south window, and left him in dim, shadowy coolness to sleep.
She came again before she started for Johnny, and found him wide awake and staring hungrily at the patch of blue sky visible through the window which faced the East.
“You’ll have to learn to obey orders better than this,” she said, severely, and took quiet possession of his wrist. “I told you not to fret about being hurt. I know you hate it—”
Chip flushed a little under her touch and the tone in which she spoke the last words. It seemed to mean that she hated it even more than he did, having him helpless in the house with her. It hadn’t been so long since she had told him plainly how little she liked him. He was not going to forget, in a hurry!
“Why don’t you send me to the hospital ?” he demanded, brusquely. “I could stand the trip, all right.”
The Little Doctor, the color coming and going in her cheeks, pressed her cool fingers against his forehead.
“Because I want you here to practice on. Do you think I’d let such a chance escape?”
After she was gone, Chip found some things to puzzle over. He felt that he was no match for the Little Doctor, and for the first time in his life he deeply regretted his ignorance of woman nature.
When the dishes were done, the Countess put her resentment behind her and went in to sit with Chip, with the best of intentions. The most disagreeable trait of some disagreeable people is that their intentions are invariably good. She had her “crochy work,” and Chip groaned inwardly when he saw her settle herself comfortably in a rocking-chair and unwind her thread. The Countess had worked hard all her life, and her hands were red and big-jointed. There was no pleasure in watching their clever manipulation of the little, steel hook. If it had been the Little Doctor’s hands, now—Chip turned again to the decapitated, pale blue vine with its pink flowers and no leaves. The Countess counted off “chain ’leven” and began in a constrained tone, such as some well-meaning people employ against helpless sick folk.
“How’re yuh feelin’ now? Yuh want a drink, or anything?”
Chip did not want a drink, and he felt all right, he guessed.
The Countess thought to cheer him a little.
“Well, I do think it’s too bad yuh got t’ lay here all through this purty spring weather. If it had been in the winter, when it’s cold and stormy outside, a person wouldn’t mind it s’ much. I know yuh must feel purty blew over it, fer yuh was always sech a hand t’ be tearin’ around the country on the dead run, seems like. I always told Mary ’t you’n Weary always rode like the sheriff wa’nt more’n a mile b’hind yuh. An’ I s’pose you feel it all the more, seein’ the round-up’s jest startin’ out. Weary said yuh was playin’ big luck, if yuh only knew enough t’ cash in yer chips at the right time, but he’s afraid yuh wouldn’t be watching the game close enough an’ ud lose yer pile. I don’t know what he was drivin’ at, an’ I guess he didn’t neither. It’s too bad, anyway. I guess yuh didn’t expect t’ wind up in bed when yuh rode off up the hill. But as the sayin’ is: ‘Man plans an’ God displans,’ an’ I guess it’s so. Here yuh are, laid up fer the summer, Dell says—the las’ thing on earth, I guess, that yuh was lookin’ fer. An’ yuh rode buckin’ bronks right along, too. I never looked fer Whizzer t’ buck yuh off, I must say—yuh got the name uh bein’ sech a good rider, too. But they say ’t the pitcher ’t’s always goin’ t’ the well is bound t’ git busted sometime, an’ I guess your turn come t’ git busted. Anyway—”
“I didn’t get bucked off,” broke in Chip, angrily. A “bronch fighter” is not more jealous of his sweetheart than of his reputation as a rider. “A fellow can’t very well make a pretty ride while his horse is turning a somersault.”
“Oh, well, I didn’t happen t’ se it—I thought Weary said ’t yuh got throwed off on the Hog’s Back. Anyway, I don’t know’s it makes much difference how yuh happened t’ hit the ground—”
“I guess it does make a difference,” cried Chip, hotly. His eyes took on the glitter of fever. “It makes a whole heap of difference, let me tell you! I’d like to hear Weary or anybody else stand up and tell me that I got bucked off. I may be pretty badly smashed up, but I’d come pretty near showing him where he stood.”
“Oh, well, yuh needn’t go t’ work an’ git mad about it,” remonstrated the Countess, dropping her thread in her perturbation at his excitement. The spool rolled under the bed and she was obliged to get down upon her knees and claw it back, and she jarred the bed and set Chip’s foot to hurting again something awful.
When she finally secured the spool and resumed her chair, Chip’s eyes were tightly closed, but the look of his mouth and the flush in his cheeks, together with his quick breathing, precluded the belief that he was asleep. The Countess was not a fool—she saw at once that fever, which the Little Doctor had feared, was fast taking hold of him. She rolled her half yard of “edging” around the spool of thread, jabbed the hook through the lump and went out and told the Old Man that Chip was getting worse every minute—which was the truth.
The Old Map knocked the ashes out of his pipe and went in to look at him.
“Did Weary say I got bucked off?” demanded the sick man before the Old Man was fairly in the room. “If he did, he lied, that’s all. I didn’t think Weary’d do me dirt like that—I thought he’d stand by me if anybody would. He knows I wasn’t throwed. I—”
“Here, young fellow,” put in the Old Man, calmly, “don’t yuh git t’ rampagin’ around over nothin’! You turn over there an’ go t’ sleep.”
“I’ll be hanged if I will!” retorted Chip. “If Weary’s taken to lying about me I’ll have it out with him if I break all the rest of my bones doing it. Do you think I’m going to stand a thing like that? I’ll see—”
“Easy there, doggone it. I never heard Weary say’t yuh got bucked off. Whizzer turned over on his head, ’s near as I c’d make out fer dust. I took it he turned a summerset.”
Chip’s befogged brain caught at the last word.
“Yes, that’s just what he did. It beats me how Weary could say, or even think, that I—it was the jack rabbit first—and I told her the supply was limited—and if we do furnish lots of amusement—but I guess I made her understand I wasn’t so easy as she took me to be. She—”
“Hey?” The Old Man could hardly be blamed for losing the drift of Chip’s rapid utterances.
“If we want to get them rounded up before the dance, I’ll—it’s a good thing it wasn’t poison, for seven dead kids at once—”
The Old Man knew something about sickness himself. He hurried out, returning in a moment with a bowl of cool water and a fringed napkin which he pilfered from the dining-room table, wisely intending to bathe Chip’s head.
But Chip would have none of him or his wise intentions. He jerked the wet napkin from the Old Man’s fingers and threw it down behind the bed, knocked up the bowl of water into the Old Man’s face and called him some very bad names. The Countess came and looked in, and Chip hurled a pillow at her and called her a bad name also, so that she retreated to the kitchen with her feelings very much hurt. After that Chip had the south room to himself until the Little Doctor returned with Johnny.
The Old Man, looking rather scared, met her on the porch. The Little Doctor read his face before she was off her horse.
“What’s the matter? Is he worse?” she demanded, abruptly.
“That’s fer you t’ find out. I ain’t no doctor. He got on the fight, a while back, an’ took t’ throwin’ things an’ usin’ langwidge. He can’t git out uh bed, thank the Lord, or we’d be takin’ t’ the hills by now.”
“Then somebody has it to answer for. He was all right when I left him, two hours ago, with not a sign of fever. Has the Countess been pestering him?”
“No,” said the Countess, popping her head out of the kitchen window and speaking in an aggrieved tone, “I hope I never pester anybody. I went an’ done all I could t’ cheer ’im up, an’ that’s all the thanks I git fer it. I must say some folks ain’t overburdened with gratitude, anyhow.”
The Little Doctor did not wait to hear her out. She went straight to the south room, pulling off her gloves on the way. The pillow on the floor told her an eloquent tale, and she sighed as she picked it up and patted some shape back into it. Chip stared at her with wide, bright eyes from the bed.
“I don’t suppose Dr. Cecil Granthum would throw pillows at anybody!” he remarked, sarcastically, as she placed it very gently under his head.
“Perhaps, if the provocation was great enough. What have they been doing to you?”
“Did Weary say I got bucked off?” he demanded, excitedly.
The Little Doctor was counting his pulse, and waited till she had finished. It was a high number—much higher than she liked.
“No, Weary didn’t. How could he? You didn’t, you know. I saw it all from the bluff, and I know the horse turned over upon you. It’s a wonder you weren’t killed outright. Now, don’t worry about it any more—I expect it was the Countess told you that. Weary hated dreadfully to leave you. I wonder if you know how much he thinks of you? I didn’t, till I saw how he looked when you—here, drink this, all of it. You’ve got to sleep, you see.”
There was a week when the house was kept very still, and the south room very cool and shadowy, and Chip did not much care who it was that ministered to him—only that the hands of the Little Doctor were always soft and soothing on his head and he wished she would keep them there always, when he was himself enough to wish anything coherently.
CHAPTER XII
“The Last Stand”
To use a trite expression and say that Chip “fought his way back to health” would be simply stating a fact and stating it mildly. He went about it much as he would go about gentling a refractory broncho, and with nearly the same results.
His ankle, however, simply could not be hurried or bluffed into premature soundness, and the Little Doctor was at her wits’ end to keep Chip from fretting himself back into fever, once he was safely pulled out of it. She made haste to explain the bit of overheard conversation, which he harped on more than he dreamed, when his head went light in that first week, and so established a more friendly feeling between them.
Still, there was a certain aloofness about him which she could not conquer, try as she might. Just so far they were comrades—beyond, Chip walked moodily alone. The Little Doctor did not like that overmuch. She preferred to know that she fairly understood her friends and was admitted, sometimes, to their full confidence. She did not relish bumping her head against a blank wall that was too high to look over or to climb, and in which there seemed to be no door.
To be sure, he talked freely, and amusingly, of his adventures and of the places he had known, but it was always an impersonal recital, and told little of his real self or his real feelings. Still, when she asked him, he told her exactly what he thought about things, whether his opinion pleased her or not.
There were times when he would sit in the old Morris chair and smoke and watch her make lacey stuff in a little, round frame. Battenberg, she said it was. He loved to see her fingers manipulate the needle and the thread, and take wonderful pains with her work—but once she showed him a butterfly whose wings did not quite match, and he pointed it out to her. She had been listening to him tell a story of Indians and cowboys and with some wild riding mixed into it, and—well, she used the wrong stitch, but no one would notice it in a thousand years. This, her argument.
“You’ll always know the mistake’s there, and you won’t get the satisfaction out of it you would if it was perfect, would you?” argued Chip, letting his eyes dwell on her face more than was good for him.
The Little Doctor pouted her lips in a way to tempt a man all he could stand, and snipped out the wing with her scissors and did it over.
So with her painting. She started a scene in the edge of the Bad Lands down the river. Chip knew the place well. There was a heated discussion over the foreground, for the Little Doctor wanted him to sketch in some Indian tepees and some squaws for her, and Chip absolutely refused to do so. He said there were no Indians in that country, and it would spoil the whole picture, anyway. The Little Doctor threatened to sketch them herself, drawing on her imagination and what little she knew of Indians, but something in his eyes stayed her hand. She left the easel in disgust and refused to touch it again for a week.
She was to spend a long day with Miss Satterly, the schoolma’am, and started off soon after breakfast one morning.
“I hope you’ll find something to keep you out of mischief while I’m gone,” she remarked, with a pretty, authoritative air. “Make him take his medicine, Johnny, and don’t let him have the crutches. Well, I think I shall hide them to make sure.”
“I wish to goodness you had that picture done,” grumbled Chip. “It seems to me you’re doing a heap of running around, lately. Why don’t you finish it up? Those lonesome hills are getting on my nerves.”
“I’ll cover it up,” said she.
“Let it be. I like to look at them.” Chip leaned back in his chair and watched her, a hunger greater than he knew in his eyes. It was most awfully lonesome when she was gone all day, and last night she had been writing all the evening to Dr. Cecil Granthum— damn him! Chip always hitched that invective to the unknown doctor’s name, for some reason he saw fit not to explain to himself. He didn’t see what she could find to write about so much, for his part. And he did hate a long day with no one but Johnny to talk to.
He craned his neck to keep her in view as long as possible, drew a long, discontented breath and settled himself more comfortably in the chair where he spent the greater part of his waking hours.
“Hand me the tobacco, will you, kid?”
He fished his cigarette book from his pocket. “Thanks!” He tore a narrow strip from the paper and sifted in a little tobacco.
“Now a match, kid, and then you’re done.”
Johnny placed the matches within easy reach, shoved a few magazines close to Chip’s elbow, and stretched himself upon the floor with a book.
Chip lay back against the cushions and smoked lazily, his eyes half closed, dreaming rather than thinking. The unfinished painting stood facing him upon its easel, and his eyes idly fixed upon it. He knew the place so well. Jagged pinnacles, dotted here and there with scrubby pines, hemmed in a tiny basin below—where was blank canvas. He went mentally over the argument again, and from that drifted to a scene he had witnessed in that same basin, one day—but that was in the winter
. Dirty gray snow drifts, where a chinook had cut them, and icy side hills made the place still drearier. And the foreground—if the Little Doctor could get that, now, she would be doing something!—ah! that foreground. A poor, half-starved range cow with her calf which the round-up had overlooked in the fall, stood at bay against a steep cut bank. Before them squatted five great, gaunt wolves intent upon fresh beef for their supper. But the cow’s horns were long, and sharp, and threatening, and the calf snuggled close to her side, shivering with the cold and the fear of death. The wolves licked their cruel lips and their eyes gleamed hungrily—but the eyes of the cow answered them, gleam for gleam. If it could be put upon canvas just as he had seen it, with the bitter, biting cold of a frozen chinook showing gray and sinister in the slaty sky—
“Kid!”
“Huh?” Johnny struggled reluctantly back to Montana.
“Get me the Little Doctor’s paint and truck, over on that table, and slide that easel up here.”
Johnny stared, opened his mouth to speak, then wisely closed it and did as he was bidden. Philosophically he told himself it was Chip’s funeral, if the Little Doctor made a kick.
“All right, kid.” Chip tossed the cigarette stub out of the window. “You can go ahead and read, now. Lock the door first, and don’t you bother me—not on your life.”
Then Chip plunged headlong into the Bad Lands, so to speak.
A few dabs of dirty white, here and there, a wholly original manipulation of the sky—what mattered the method, so he attained the result? Half an hour, and the hills were clutched in the chill embrace of a “frozen chinook” such as the Little Doctor had never seen in her life. But Johnny, peeping surreptitiously over Chip’s shoulder, stared at the change; then, feeling the spirit of it, shivered in sympathy with the barren hills.
