or higher praise, than that, Miss Della. One forgets that it is a picture. One only feels a deep longing for a good rifle. You must let me take it with me to Butte. That picture will make you famous among cattlemen, at least. That is to say, out West, here. And if you will sell it I am positive I can get you a high price for it.”
The eyes of the Little Doctor involuntarily sought the Morris chair in the next room; but Chip was looking out across the coulee, as he had a habit of doing lately, and seemed not to hear what was going on in the parlor. He was indifference personified, if one might judge from his outward appearance. The Little Doctor turned her glance resentfully to her brother’s partner.
“Do you mean all that?” she demanded of him.
“I certainly do. It is great, Miss Della. I admit that it is not quite like your other work; the treatment seems different, in places, and—er— stronger. It is the best picture of the kind that I have ever seen, I think. It holds one, in a way—”
“By golly, I bet Chip took a pitcher uh that!” exclaimed Slim, who had been doing some hard thinking. “He was tellin’ us last winter about ridin’ up on that ole Diamon’ Bar cow with a pack uh wolves around her, an’ her a-standin’ ’em off, an’ he shot two uh the wolves. Yes, sir; Chip jest about got a snap shot of ’em.”
“Well, doggone it! what if he did?” The Old Man turned jealously upon him. “It ain’t everyone that kin paint like that, with nothin’ but a little kodak picture t’ go by. Doggone it! I don’t care if Dell had a hull apurn full uh kodak pictures that Chip took—it’s a rattlin’ good piece uh work, all the same.”
“I ain’t sayin’ anything agin’ the pitcher,” retorted Slim. “I was jest wonderin’ how she happened t’ git that cow down s’ fine, brand ’n all, without some kind uh pattern t’ go by. S’ fur ’s the pitcher goes, it’s about as good ’s kin be did with paint, I guess. I ain’t ever seen anything in the pitcher line that looked any natcherler.”
“Well, I do think it’s just splendid!” gurgled the Countess. “It’s every bit as good ’s the one Mary got with a year’s subscription t’ the Household Treasure fer fifty cents. That one’s got some hounds chasin’ a deer and a man hidin’ in the bushes, sost yuh kin jest see his head. It’s an awful purty pitcher, but this one’s jest as good. I do b’lieve it’s a little bit better, if anything. Mary’s has got some awful nice, green grass, an’ the sky’s an awful purty blue—jest about the color uh my blue silk waist. But yuh can’t expect t’ have grass an’ sky like that in the winter, an’ this is more of a winter pitcher. It looks awful cold an’ lonesome, somehow, an’ it makes yuh want t’ cry, if yuh look at it long enough.”
The critics stampeded, as they always did when the Countess began to talk.
“You better let Dunk take it with him, Dell,” was the parting advice of the Old Man.
CHAPTER XIV
Convalescence
“You don’t mind, do you?” The Little Doctor was visibly uneasy.
“Mind what?” Chip’s tone was one of elaborate unconsciousness. “Mind Dunk’s selling the picture for you? Why should I? It’s yours, you know.”
“I think you have some interest in it yourself,” she said, without looking at him. “You don’t think I mean to—to—”
“I don’t think anything, except that it’s your picture, and I put in a little time meddling with your property for want of something else to do. All I painted doesn’t cover one quarter of the canvas, and I guess you’ve done enough for me to more than make up. I guess you needn’t worry over that cow and calf—you’re welcome to them both; and if you can get a bounty on those five wolves, I’ll be glad to have you. Just keep still about my part of it.”
Chip really felt that way about it, after the first dash of wounded pride. He could never begin to square accounts with the Little Doctor, anyhow, and he was proud that he could do something for her, even if it was nothing more than fixing up a picture so that it rose considerably above mediocrity. He had meant it that way all along, but the suspicion that she was quite ready to appropriate his work rather shocked him, just at first. No one likes having a gift we joy in bestowing calmly taken from our hands before it has been offered. He wanted her to have the picture for her very own—but—but—He had not thought of the possibility of her selling it, or of Dunk as her agent. It was all right, of course, if she wanted to do that with it, but—There was something about it that hurt, and the hurt of it was not less, simply because he could not locate the pain.
His mind fidgeted with the subject. If he could have saddled Silver and gone for a long gallop over the prairie land, he could have grappled with his rebellious inner self and choked to death several unwelcome emotions, he thought. But there was Silver, crippled and swung uncomfortably in canvas wrappings in the box stall, and here was himself, crippled and held day after day in one room and one chair—albeit a very pleasant room and a very comfortable chair—and a gallop as impossible to one of them as to the other.
“I do wish—” The Little Doctor checked herself abruptly, and hummed a bit of coon song.
“What do you wish?” Chip pushed his thoughts behind him, and tried to speak in his usual manner.
“Nothing much. I was just wishing Cecil could see ‘The Last Stand.’”
Chip said absolutely nothing for five minutes, and for an excellent reason. There was not a single thought during that time which would sound pretty if put into words, and he had no wish to shock the Little Doctor.
After that day a constraint fell upon them both, which each felt keenly and neither cared to explain away. “The Last Stand” was tacitly dismissed from their conversation, of which there grew less and less as the days passed.
Then came a time when Chip strongly resented being looked upon as an invalid, and Johnny was sent home, greatly to his sorrow.
Chip hobbled about the house on crutches, and chafed and fretted, and managed to be very miserable indeed because he could not get out and ride and clear his brain and heart of some of their hurt—for it had come to just that; he had been compelled to own that there was a hurt which would not heal in a hurry.
It was a very bitter young man who, lounging in the big chair by the window one day, suddenly snorted contempt at a Western story he had been reading and cast the magazine—one of the Six Leading—clean into the parlor where it sprawled its artistic leaves in the middle of the floor. The Little Doctor was somewhere—he never seemed to know just where, nowadays—and the house was lonesome as an isolated peak in the Bad Lands.
“I wish I had the making of the laws. I’d put a bounty on all the darn fools that think they can write cowboy stories just because they rode past a roundup once, on a fast train,” he growled, reaching for his tobacco sack. “Huh! I’d like to meet up with the yahoo that wrote that rank yarn! I’d ask him where he got his lack of information. Huh! A cow-puncher togged up like he was going after the snakiest bronk in the country, when he was only going to drive to town in a buckboard! ‘His pistol belt and dirk and leathern chaps’—oh, Lord; oh, Lord! And spurs! I wonder if he thinks it takes spurs to ride a buckboard? Do they think, back East, that spurs grow on a man’s heels out here and won’t come off? Do they think we sleep in ’em, I wonder?” He drew a match along the arm of the chair where the varnish was worn off. “They think all a cow-puncher has to do is eat and sleep and ride fat horses. I’d like to tell some of them a few things that they don’t—”
“I’ve brought you a caller, Chip. Aren’t you glad to see him?” It was the Little Doctor at the window, and the laugh he loved was in her voice and in her eyes, that it hurt him to meet, lately.
The color surged to his face, and he leaned from the window, his thin, white hand outstretched caressingly.
“I’d tell a man!” he said, and choked a little over it. “Silver, old boy!”
Silver, nickering