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I must have struck terror deeper into the heart of that Redskin than I imagined, for rather than face death and torture at my hands she left Slip-Along and the buckboard at the Teetzel Ranch and vamoosed off into the great unknown. I have done up her valuables in an old sugar-sack, and if they're not sent for in a week's time I'll make a bonfire of the truck.
So I repeated my message; and yesterday morning Hy Teetzel, homeward bound from Buckhorn in his tin Lizzie, brought the long-expected reply out to me. It read: "Would advise consulting my ranch manager on the matter mentioned in your wire," and was signed "Alicia Newland."
Teetzel, he knew had a tread that was noiseless. She also had the habit of appearing, in curl-papers, at uncouth moments, as unheralded as an apparition from the other world. And Trotter's conscience was not clear. For months past he had kept secreted in his trunk one of those single-holed gas heaters known as a "hot plate."
Trotter crept down through the quiet house with all the trepidation of a sneak-thief. His one dread was the apparition of Mrs. Teetzel; she would naturally surmise he was making away with the bedroom stoneware, or the door knobs, or even the lead piping. He felt freer when he had once gained the street.
Other horsemen, I found, had come loping up in the ghostly twilight where we stood. I could see the breath from their mounts' nostrils, white in the frosty air. "You, Teetzel, and you, O'Malley," called my husband, in an oddly authoritative and barking voice, "and you on the roan there, swing twenty paces out from one another and circle the shack. Then widen the circle, each turn.
Tell my husband that our boy, that my boy, is lost on the prairie. Tell him to get help, and come, come quick. And stop at the Teetzel ranch on your way. Tell them to send men on horses, and lanterns! But move, woman, move!" Ikkie went, with Slip-Along making the buckboard skid on the uneven trail as though he were playing a game of crack-the-whip with that frightened Indian.
But he'll learn to love them, I feel sure, as time goes on. He's too intelligent a dog to do otherwise.... I'll be glad when spring comes, and takes the razor-edge out of this northern air. We'll have half a month of mud first, I suppose. But "there's never anything without something," as Mrs. Teetzel very sagely announced the other day.
I groped my way in through the darkness, quite calm again, and sat down and unbuttoned my waist and nursed Poppsy, and then took up the indignant and wailing Pee-Wee, vaguely wondering if the milk in my breast wouldn't prove poison to them and if all my blood hadn't turned to acid. I was still nursing Pee-Wee when Bud Teetzel came into the shack and asked how many lanterns we had about the place.
Teetzel would keep his feet dry and cook his cream-of-wheat properly, and if Iroquois Annie would have brains enough not to overheat the furnace and burn Casa Grande down to the ground. Then I decided to send the wire to Dinky-Dunk, after all, for it isn't every day in the year a man can be told he's the father of twins....
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