B. M. Bower

B. M. BOWER: Historical Novels, Westerns & Old West Sagas (Illustrated Edition)


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shut the gate himself, and led the way up the creek at a fast trot.

      “I guess Doctor Dell will be glad to see me,” the Kid observed wistfully. “I’ve been gone most a year, I guess.”

      Neither Andy nor Miss Allen made any reply to this. Their eyes were searching the hilltop for riders, that they might signal. But there was no one in sight anywhere.

      “Hadn’t you better shout?” suggested Miss Allen. “Or would it be better to go quietly—”

      Andy did not reply; nor did he shout. Andy, at that moment, was fighting a dryness in his throat. He could not have called out if he had wanted to. They rode to the stable and stopped. Andy lifted the Kid down and set him on his two feet by the stable door while he turned to Miss Allen. For once in his life he was at a loss. He did not know how best to bring the Kid to the Little Doctor; How best to lighten the shock of seeing safe and well the manchild who she thought was dead. He hesitated. Perhaps he should have ridden on to the house with him. Perhaps he should have fired the signal when first he came into the coulee. Perhaps...

      The Kid himself swept aside Andy’s uncertainties. Adeline, the cat, came out of the stable and looked at them contemplatively. Adeline still had the string tied to her tail, and a wisp of paper tied to the string. The Kid pounced and caught her by the middle.

      “I guess I can tie knots so they stay, by cripes!” he shouted vaingloriously. “I guess Happy Jack can’t tie strings any better ‘n me, can he? Nice kitty—c’m back here, you son-a-gun!”

      Adeline had not worried over the absence of the Kid, but his hilarious arrival seemed to worry her considerably. She went bounding up the path to the house, and after her went the Kid, yelling epithets which were a bit shocking for one of his age.

      So he came to the porch just when Chip and the Little Doctor reached it, white-faced and trembling. Adeline paused to squeeze under the steps, and the Kid catching her by the tail, dragged her back yowling. While his astounded parents watched him unbelievingly, the Kid gripped Adeline firmly and started up the steps.

      “I ketched the son-a-gun!” he cried jubilantly.

      “Say, I seen a skink, Daddy Chip, and I frowed a rock and knocked his block off ‘cause he was going to swipe my grub. Was you s’prised, Doctor Dell?”

      Doctor Dell did not say. Doctor Dell was kneeling on the porch floor with the Kid held closer in her arms than ever he held the cat, and she was crying and laughing and kissing him all at once—though nobody except a mother can perform that feat.

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      It is amazing how quickly life swings back to the normal after even so harrowing an experience as had come to the Flying U. Tragedy had hovered there a while and had turned away with a smile, and the smile was reflected upon the faces and in the eyes of everyone upon whose souls had fallen her shadow. The Kid was safe, and he was well, and he had not suffered from the experience; on the contrary he spent most of his waking hours in recounting his adventures to an admiring audience. He was a real old cowpuncher. He had gone into the wilderness and he had proven the stuff that was in him. He had made “dry-camp” just exactly as well as any of the Happy Family could have done. He had slept out under the stars rolled in a blanket—and do you think for one minute that he would ever submit to lace-trimmed nighties again? If you do, ask the little Doctor what the Kid said on the first night after his return, when she essayed to robe him in spotless white and rock him, held tight in her starved arms. Or you might ask his Daddy Chip, who hovered pretty close to them both, his eyes betraying how his soul gave thanks. Or—never mind, I’ll tell you myself.

      The Little Doctor brought the nightie, and reached out her two eager arms to take the kid off Chip’s knees where he was perched contentedly relating his adventures with sundry hair-raising additions born of his imagination. The Kid was telling Daddy Chip about the skunk he saw, and he hated to be interrupted. He looked at his Doctor Dell and at the familiar, white garment with lace at the neck and wristbands, and he waved his hand with a gesture of dismissal.

      “Aw, take that damn’ thing away!” he told her in the tone of the real old cowpuncher. “When I get ready to hit the bed-ground, a blanket is all I’ll need.”

      Lest you should think him less lovable than he really was, I must add that, when Chip set him down hastily so that he himself could rush off somewhere and laugh in secret, the Kid spread his arms with a little chuckle and rushed straight at his Doctor Dell and gave her a real bear hug.

      “I want to be rocked,” he told her—and was her own baby man again, except that he absolutely refused to reconsider the nightgown. “And I want you to tell me a story—about when Silver breaked his leg. Silver’s a good ole scout, you bet. I don’t know what I’d a done ‘theut Silver. And tell about the bunch makin’ a man outa straw to scare you, and the horses runned away. I was such a far ways, Doctor Dell, and I couldn’t get back to hear them stories and I’ve most forgot about ‘em. And tell about Whizzer, Doctor Dell.”

      The Little Doctor rocked him and told him of the old days, and she never again brought him his lace-trimmed nightie at bedtime. She never mentioned his language upon the subject, either. The Little Doctor was learning some things about her man-child, and one of them was this: When he rode away into the Badlands and was lost, other things were lost, and lost permanently; he was no longer her baby, for all he liked to be rocked. He had come back to her changed, so that she studied him amazedly while she worshipped. He had entered boldly into the life which men live, and he would never come back entirely to the old order of things. He would never be her baby; there would be a difference, even while she held him in her arms and him rocked him to sleep.

      She knew that it was so, when the Kid insisted, next day, upon going home with the bunch; with Andy, rather, who was just now the Kid’s particular hero. He had to help the bunch he said; they needed him, and Andy needed him and Miss Allen needed him.

      “Aw, you needn’t be scared, Doctor Dell,” he told her shrewdly. “I ain’t going to find them brakes any more. I’ll stick with the bunch, cross my heart, and I’ll come back tonight if you’re scared ‘theut me. Honest to gran’ma, I’ve got to go and help the bunch lick the stuffen’ outa them nesters, Doctor Dell.”

      The Little Doctor looked at him strangely, hugged him tight—and let him go. Chip would be with them, and he would bring the Kid home safely, and—the limitations of dooryard play no longer sufficed; her fledgling had found what his wings were for, and the nest was too little, now.

      “We’ll take care of him,” Andy promised her understandingly. “If Chip don’t come up, this afternoon, I’ll bring him home myself. Don’t you worry a minute about him.”

      “I’d tell a man she needn’t!” added the Kid patronizingly.

      “I suppose he’s a lot safer with you boys than he is here at the ranch—unless one of us stood over him all the time, or we tied him up,” she told Andy gamely. “I feel like a hen trying to raise a duck! Go on, Buck—but give mother a kiss first.”

      The Kid kissed her violently and with a haste that betrayed where his thoughts were, in spite of the fact that never before had his mother called him Buck.

      To her it was a supreme surrender of his babyhood—to him it was merely his due. The Little Doctor sighed and watched him ride away beside Andy. “Children are such self-centred little beasts!” she told J. G. rue-fully. “I almost wish he was a girl.”

      “Ay? If he was a girl he wouldn’t git lost, maybe, but some feller’d take him away from yuh just the same. The Kid’s all right. He’s just the kind you expect him to be and want him to be. You’re tickled to death because he’s like he is. Doggone it, Dell, that Kid’s got the real stuff in him! He’s a dead ringer fer his dad—that ought to do yuh.”

      “It does,” the Little Doctor declared. “But it does seem as if