Chapter 20. The Rell Ole Cowpuncher Goes Home - Page 2

me a gun. And then if you get lost I can take care of you like Andy can. I'll be ten next week, I guess." He turned as Andy came back slicing off the branches of a willow the size of his thumb.

"Say, old-timer, where's the rest of the bunch?" he inquired casually. "Did you git your cattle rounded up?"

"Not yet." Andy sharpened the prongs of his stick and carefully impaled the back of the rabbit.

"Well, I'll help you out. But I guess I better go home first--I guess Doctor Dell might need me, maybe."

"I know she does, Buck." Andy's voice had a peculiar, shaky sound that the Kid did not understand. "She needs you right bad. We'll hit the high places right away quick."

Since Andy had gone at daybreak and brought the horses over into this canyon, his statement was a literal one. They ate hurriedly and started--and Miss Allen insisted that Andy was all turned around, and that they were going in exactly the wrong direction, and blushed and was silent when Andy, turning his face full toward her, made a kissing motion with his lips.

"You quit that!" the Kid commanded him sharply. "She's my girl I guess I found her first 'fore you did, and you ain't goin' to kiss her."

After that there was no lovemaking but the most decorous conversation between these two.

Flying U Coulee lay deserted under the warm sunlight of early forenoon. Deserted, and silent with the silence that tells where Death has stopped with his sickle. Even the Kid seemed to feel a strangeness in the atmosphere--a stillness that made his face sober while he looked around the little pasture and up at the hill trail. In all the way home they had not met anyone--but that may have been because Andy chose the way up Flying U Creek as being shorter and therefore more desirable.

At the lower line fence of the little pasture Andy refused to believe the Kid's assertion of having opened and shut the gate, until the Kid got down and proved that he could open it--the shutting process being too slow for Andy's raw nerves. He lifted the Kid into the saddle and 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