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Happy Jack, with the cook's apron tied tightly around his lank middle, stood despondently in the doorway of the mess-tent and said no word as they approached. In his silence in his very presence there Weary read disaster. "I guess we're too late," he told Dock, in hushed tones; for the minute he hated the white-bearded old man whose drunkenness had cost the Flying-U so dear.
The first beams of the sun were touching redly the hilltops and the birds were singing from swaying weeds when they rode down the last slope into the valley where camped the Flying-U. The night-hawk had driven the horses into the rope-corral and men were inside watching, with spread loop, for a chance to throw.
Somebody laughed suddenly, and another chuckle helped to point the joke, until the whole outfit was in an uproar; for of all the men who had slept under Flying-U tents and eaten beside the mess-wagon, Andy Green was conceded to be the greatest, the most shameless and wholly incorrigible liar of the lot. "Aw, yuh don't want to get jealous of an old stiff like that," Pink soothed musically.
"I I've got to go up to the Falls, along about Christmas," he stuttered feebly, avoiding her eyes. "I I can't get off any other time, and I've I've got a tooth " "You're the fifth Flying-U man who has 'a tooth," the schoolma'am interrupted impatiently.
The men crowded close and asked questions which Weary felt bound to answer; everyone knew Patsy, who was almost as much a part of Dry Lake scenery as was Old Dock, and it was gratifying to a Flying-U man to see the sympathy in their faces. But Patsy needed something more potent than sympathy, and the minutes were passing.