Chapter 9. The Happy Family Buys a Bunch of Cattle

With the Kid riding gleefully upon Weary's shoulder they trooped up the path their own feet had helped wear deep to the bunk-house. They looked in at the open door and snorted at the cheerlessness of the place.

"Why don't you come back here and stay?" the Kid demanded. "I was going to sleep down here with you--and now Doctor Dell won't let me. These hobees are no good. They're damn' bone- head. Daddy Chip says so. I wish you'd come back, so I can sleep with you. One man's named Ole and he's got a funny eye that looks at the other one all the time. I wish you'd come back."

The Happy Family wished the same thing, but they did not say so. Instead they told the Kid to ask his mother if he couldn't come and visit them in their new shacks, and promised indulgences that would have shocked the Little Doctor had she heard them. So they went on to the house, where the Old Man sat on the porch looking madder than when they had left him three weeks before.

"Why don't yuh run them nesters outa the country?" he demanded peevishly when they were close enough for speech. "Here they come and accuse me to my face of trying to defraud the gov'ment. Doggone you boys, what you think you're up to, anyway? What's three or four thousand acres when they're swarming in here like flies to a butcherin'? They can't make a living--serve 'em right. What you doggone rowdies want now?"

Not a cordial welcome, that--if they went no deeper than his words. But there was the old twinkle back of the querulousness in the Old Man's eyes, and the old pucker of the lips behind his grizzled whiskers. "You've got that doggone Kid broke to foller yuh so we can't keep him on the ranch no more," he added fretfully. "Tried to run away twice, on Silver. Chip had to go round him up. Found him last time pretty near over to Antelope coulee, hittin' the high places for town. Might as well take yuh back, I guess, and save time running after the Kid."

"We've got to hold down our claims," Weary minded him regretfully. In three weeks, he could see a difference the Old Man, and the change hurt him.

Lines were deeper drawn, and the kind old eyes were a shade more sunken.

"What's that amount to?" grumbled the Old Man, looking from one to the other under his graying eye brows. "You can't stop them dry-farmers from taking the country. Yuh might as well try to dip the Missouri dry with a bucket. They'll flood the country with stock--"

"No, they won't," put in Big Medicine, impatient for the real meat of their errand. "By cripes, we got a scheme to beat that--you tell 'im, Weary."

"We want to buy a bunch of cattle from you," Weary said obediently. "We want to graze our claims, instead of trying to crop the land. We haven't any fence up, so we'll have to range-herd our stock, of course.