seemed undecided between tears and laughter. “Oh, Grant, Grant! She’ll think you’re ready to murder everybody on the ranch—and you can be such a nice boy when you want to be! I did hope—”
“I don’t want to be nice,” Grant objected, drawing a match along a fairly smooth rock.
“Well, I wanted you to appear at your best; and, instead of that, here you come, squabbling with old Hagar like—”
“Yes—sure. But who is the timid lady?”
“Timid! You nearly killed the poor girl, besides scaring her half to death, and then you call her timid. I know she thought there was going to be a real Indian massacre, right here, and she’d be scalped—”
Wally Hart came back, laughing to himself.
“Say, you’ve sure cooked your goose with old Hagar, Grant! She’s right on the warpath, and then some. She’d like to burn yuh alive—she said so. She’s headed for camp, and all the rest of the bunch at her heels. She won’t come here any more till you’re kicked off the ranch, as near as I could make out her jabbering. And she won’t do your washing any more, mum—she said so. You’re kay bueno yourself, because you take Good Indian’s part. We’re all kay bueno—all but me. She wanted me to quit the bunch and go live in her wikiup. I’m the only decent one in the outfit.” He gave his mother an affectionate little hug as he went past, and began an investigative tour of the stone jars on the cool rock floor within. “What was it all about, Grant? What did yuh do to her, anyway?”
“Oh, it wasn’t anything. Hand me up a cup of that buttermilk, will you? They’ve got a dog up there in camp that I’m going to kill some of these days—if they don’t beat me to it. He was up at the store, and when I went out to get my horse, he tried to take a leg off me. I kicked him in the nose and he came at me again, so when I mounted I just dropped my loop over Mr. Dog. Sleeping Turtle was there, and he said the dog belonged to Viney, So I just led him gently to camp.”
He grinned a little at the memory of his gentleness. “I told Viney I thought he’d make a fine stew, and, they’d better use him up right away before he spoiled. That’s all there was to it. Well, Keno did sink his head and pitch around camp a little, but not to amount to anything. He just stuck his nose into old Hagar’s wikiup—and one sniff seemed to be about all he wanted. He didn’t hurt anything.”
He took a meditative bite of cake, finished the buttermilk in three rapturous swallows, and bethought him of the feminine mystery.
“If you please, Mother Hart, who was that Christmas angel I squashed?”
“Vad? Was Vad in on it, mum? I never saw her.” Wally straightened up with a fresh chunk of cake in his hand. “Was she scared?”
“Yes,” his mother admitted reluctantly, “I guess she was, all right. First the squaws—and, poor girl, I made her shake hands all round—and then Grant here, acting like a wild hyena—”
“Say, please don’t tell me who she is, or where she belongs, or anything like that,” Grant interposed, with some sarcasm. “I smashed her flat between me and the wall, and I scared the daylights out of her; and I’m told I should have appeared at my best. But who she is, or where she belongs—”
“She belongs right here.” Phoebe’s tone was a challenge, whether she meant it to be so or not. “This is going to be her home from now on; and I want you boys to treat her nicer than you’ve been doing. She’s been here a week almost; and there ain’t one of you that’s made friends with her yet, or tried to, even. You’ve played jokes on her, and told her things to scare her—and my grief! I was hoping she’d have a softening influence on you, and make gentlemen of you. And far as I can make out, just having her on the place seems to put the Old Harry into every one of you! It isn’t right. It isn’t the way I expected my boys would act toward a stranger—a girl especially. And I did hope Grant would behave better.”
“Sure, he ought to. Us boneheads don’t know any better—but Grant’s educated.” Wally grinned and winked elaborately at his mother’s back.
“I’m not educated up to Christmas angels that look as if they’d been stepped on,” Grant defended himself.
“She’s a real nice little thing. If you boys would quit teasing the life out of her, I don’t doubt but what, in six months or so, you wouldn’t know the girl,” Phoebe argued, with some heat.
“I don’t know the girl now.” Grant spoke dryly. “I don’t want to. If I’d held a tomahawk in one hand and her flowing locks in the other, and was just letting a war-whoop outa me, she’d look at me—the way she did look.” He snorted in contemptuous amusement, and gave a little, writhing twist of his slim body into his trousers. “I never did like blondes,” he added, in a tone of finality, and started up the steps.
“You never liked anything that wore skirts,” Phoebe flung after him indignantly; and she came very close to the truth.
CHAPTER IV
THE CHRISTMAS ANGEL
Phoebe watched the two unhappily, sighed when they disappeared around the corner of the house, and set her bowl of butter upon the broad, flat rock which just missed being overflowed with water, and sighed again.
“I’m afraid it isn’t going to work,” she murmured aloud; for Phoebe, having lived much of her life in the loneliness which the West means to women, frequently talked to herself. “She’s such a nice little thing—but the boys don’t take to her like I thought they would. I don’t see as she’s having a mite of influence on their manners, unless it’s to make them act worse, just to shock her. Clark used to take off his hat when he come into the house most every time. And great grief! Now he’d wear it and his chaps and spurs to the table, if I didn’t make him take them off. She’s nice—she’s most too nice. I’ve got to give that girl a good talking to.”
She mounted the steps to the back porch, tried the kitchen door, and found it locked. She went around to the door on the west side, opposite the gate, found that also secured upon the inside, and passed grimly to the next.
“My grief! I didn’t know any of these doors could be locked!” she muttered angrily. “They never have been before that I ever heard of.” She stopped before Evadna’s window, and saw, through a slit in the green blind, that the old-fashioned bureau had been pulled close before it. “My grief!” she whispered disgustedly, and retraced her steps to the east side, which, being next to the pond, was more secluded. She surveyed dryly a window left wide open there, gathered her brown-and-white calico dress close about her plump person, and crawled grimly through into the sitting-room, where, to the distress of Phoebe’s order-loving soul, the carpet was daily well-sanded with the tread of boys’ boots fresh from outdoors, and where cigarette stubs decorated every window-sill, and the stale odor of Peaceful’s pipe was never long absent.
She went first to all the outer rooms, and unlocked every one of the outraged doors which, unless in the uproar and excitement of racing, laughing boys pursuing one another all over the place with much slamming and good-natured threats of various sorts, had never before barred the way of any man, be he red or white, came he at noon or at midnight.
Evadna’s door was barricaded, as Phoebe discovered when she turned the knob and attempted to walk in. She gave the door an indignant push, and heard a muffled shriek within, as if Evadna’s head was buried under her pillow.
“My grief! A body’d think you expected to be killed and eaten,” she called out unsympathetically. “You open this door! Vadnie Ramsey. This is a nice way to act with my own boys, in my own house! A body’d think—”
There was the sound of something heavy being dragged laboriously away from the barricaded door; and in a minute a vividly blue eye appeared at a narrow crack.
“Oh, I don’t see how you dare to l-live in such a place, Aunt Phoebe!” she cried tearfully, opening the door a bit wider. “Those Indians—and that awful man—”
“That was only