Phoebe caught him again by the arm and pulled him forward. "Grant! You're squeezing Vadnie to death, just about! Great grief, I forgot all about the poor child being here! You poor little--"
"Squeezing who?" Grant whirled, and caught a brief glimpse of a crumpled little figure behind him, evidently too scared to cry, and yet not quite at the fainting point of terror. He backed, and began to stammer an apology; but she did not wait to hear a word of it. For an instant she stared into his face, and then, like a rabbit released from its paralysis of dread, she darted past him and deaf up the stone steps into the house. He heard the kitchen-door shut, and the click of the lock. He heard other doors slam suggestively; and he laughed in spite of his astonishment.
"And who the deuce might that be?" he asked, feeling in his pocket for smoking material.
Phoebe seemed undecided between tears and laughter. "Oh, Grant, GRANT! She'll think you're ready to murder everybody on the ranch--and you can be such a nice boy when you want to be! I did hope--"
"I don't want to be nice," Grant objected, drawing a match along a fairly smooth rock.
"Well, I wanted you to appear at your best; and, instead of that, here you come, squabbling with old Hagar like--"
"Yes--sure. But who is the timid lady?"
"Timid! You nearly killed the poor girl, besides scaring her half to death, and then you call her timid. I know she thought there was going to be a real Indian massacre, right here, and she'd be scalped--"
Wally Hart came back, laughing to himself.
"Say, you've sure cooked your goose with old Hagar, Grant! She's right on the warpath, and then some. She'd like to burn yuh alive--she said so. She's headed for camp, and all the rest of the bunch at her heels. She won't come here any more till you're kicked off the ranch, as near as I could make out her jabbering. And she won't do your washing any more, mum--she said so. You're kay bueno yourself, because you take Good Indian's part. We're all kay bueno--all but me. She wanted me to quit the bunch and go live in her wikiup. I'm the only decent one in the outfit." He gave his mother an affectionate little hug as he went past, and began an investigative tour of the stone jars on the cool rock floor within. "What was it all about, Grant? What did yuh do to her, anyway?"
"Oh, it wasn't anything. Hand me up a cup of that buttermilk, will you? They've got a dog up there in camp that I'm going to kill some of these days--if they don't beat me to it. He was up at the store, and when I went out to get my horse, he tried to take a leg off me. I kicked him in the nose and he came at me again, so when I mounted I just dropped my loop over Mr. Dog. Sleeping Turtle was there, and he said the dog belonged to Viney, So I just led him gently to camp."