"Golly gosh!" said Ricks, incredulously. "Well, I got to be hikin' back. The next
is my entry. I'll look you up after while. So-long!"
He shambled off, and Sandy watched his broad-checked back until it was lost in the crowd.
That Ricks should have turned up at that critical moment seemed a wilful prank on the part of fate. Sandy bit his lip and raged inwardly. He had a wild impulse to rush back to Ruth, seize her hand, and begin where he had left off. He might have done it, too, had not the promenade happened to land Dr. Fenton before him at that moment.
The doctor was behaving in a most extraordinary and unmilitary way. He had stepped out of the ranks, and was performing strange manoeuvers about a knothole that looked into the courting-box. When he saw Sandy he opened fire.
"Look at her! Look at her!" he whispered. "Whenever I pass she talks to Jimmy Reed on this side; but the moment she thinks I'm not looking, sir, she talks
to Nelson on the other! Kilday," he went on, shaking his finger impressively, "that little girl is as slick as—a blame Yankee! But she'll not outwit me. I'm going right up there and take her home."
Sandy laughingly held his arm. It was not the first time the doctor had confided in him. "No, no, doctor," he said; "I'll be the watch-dog for ye. Let me go and stay with Annette, and if Carter Nelson gets a word in her ear, it'll be because I've forgotten how to talk."
"Will you?" asked the doctor, anxiously. "Nelson's a drunkard. I'd rather see my little girl dead than married to him. But she's wilful, Kilday; when she was just a baby she'd sit with her little pink toes curled up for an hour to keep me from putting on her shoes when she wanted to go barefoot! She's a fighter," he added, with a gruff chuckle that ended in a sigh, "but she's all I've got."
Sandy gripped him by the hand, then turned the corner into the courting-box.