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He was one of the sheriff's deputies. He grinned as he tapped his empty holster. "One of your watchdogs lifted my gun," he said. He handed Harris a note. After reading it Harris looked at his watch and snapped it shut, glanced at the sinking sun and turned to the girl. "I have to make a little jaunt," he explained. "Alden wants to see me. I'll take Waddles along.
Rather it was as if she gazed into some instrument which portrayed the moves of mannikins; yet the scene wholly absorbed her interest. Waddles cautiously raised his head for a view of the stockade and she could see his convulsive duck as a rifle ball tossed up a spurt of gravel round it. The man who had fired the shot went down as the sheriff drilled the spot where a faint haze of smoke had shown.
The voice of Waddles reached them. He was announcing a half-day of rest, according to her orders. "It's kill-time for the rest of the day," he stated. "Make the most of it." For three weeks past, excepting for the trip to Brill's, the men had toiled incessantly, breakfasting before sunup and seeking their bunks long after dark. Some immediately turned to their bed rolls to make up lost sleep.
Waddles and Moore brought up the rear with a pack train loaded with the bed rolls saved from the bunk-house fire. Harris knew that action, not inaction was the best outlet for her energies, temporarily smothered by the shock of the raid. It was not in her nature to sit with folded hands among the ruins of the ranch and patiently wait for news. "I thought maybe you'd like to go," he said.
"Good night, Billie," he said. "I expect maybe things will break all right for us." She did not answer and he went out. Waddles hailed him in friendly fashion as he passed through the cookhouse, then wiped his hands and stepped into Billie's quarters. Waddles was a fixture at the Three Bar; he had ridden for her father until he had his legs smashed up by a horse and had thereafter reigned as cook.
She had deliberately absented herself through the noon hour and well past the time for evening meal, confidently expecting to find him impatiently waiting for her to return and prepare food for him. "You make good biscuits better than those Waddles stirs up," she said. "Though I'd never dare tell him so." It was the first time she had conceded that there might be even a taint of good in him.
There is one thing I can tell you now, and that is that you won't be allowed to wear those slippers any longer. I'll give you an order, and you can go downstairs to the bureau and get a pair of school shoes like the other girls wear." Rhoda gasped with dismay. "What! Those frightful things with square toes and no heels! Those awful tubs that Thomasina waddles about in!"
His usual lazy drawl is exchanged for foolish excitement. Two or three more gentlemen, tired of Trebooze's absurdities, are scrambling over the rocks above, in search of spraints. Old Tardrew waddles stooping along the line where grass and shingle meet, his bulldog visage bent to his very knees. "Tardrew out hunting?" says Campbell. "Why, it is but a week since his daughter was buried!"
"He did it for the girl of old Cal Warren, the best friend he had topside of ground," Waddles said. "Your dad and Bill Harris had been pals since they was hatched." "But why didn't they let us know?" she insisted. "Instead of tangling it up in this round-about way?" "Bill Harris had a soft spot in his heart for the old Three Bar the same as your daddy had," Waddles said.
Then he soars in elegant curves and glides up the invisible hills of the atmosphere. Most noteworthy is the perfect freedom of the albatross. He shuns the mainland and breeds on solitary islands; he can scarcely move on the ground, and when he is forced to alight he waddles clumsily along like a swan.
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