Chapter 21. The Fight Goes On - Page 2

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 he might be contented here with me for a little while-- after such a horrible time--"

"It wasn't horrible to him, yuh want to recollect. Doggone it, I wish