Miguel glanced up at them as impersonally as if they were two cackling hens, rather than derisive humans, then bent his head over a stubborn knot and whistled La Paloma softly while he coaxed out the tangle.
Pink's eyes widened as he looked, but he did not say anything. He backed up the path and went thoughtfully to the corrals, leaving Big Medicine to follow or not, as he chose.
“Combin'—his chaps, by cripes!” came rumbling behind him. Pink turned.
“Say! Don't make so much noise about it,” he advised guardedly. “I've got an idea.”
“Yuh want to hog-tie it, then,” Big Medicine retorted, resentful because Pink seemed not to grasp the full humor of the thing. “Idees sure seems to be skurce in this outfit—or that there lily-uh-the-valley couldn't set and comb no chaps in broad daylight, by cripes; not and get off with it.”
“He's an ornament to the Flying U,” Pink stated dreamily. “Us boneheads don't appreciate him, is all that ails us. What we ought to do is—help him be as pretty as he wants to be, and—”
“Looky here, Little One.” Big Medicine hurried his steps until he was close alongside. “I wouldn't give a punched nickel for a four-horse load uh them idees, and that's the truth.” He passed Pink and went on ahead, disgust in every line of his square-shouldered figure. “Combin' his chaps, by cripes!” he snorted again, and straightway told the tale profanely to his fellows, who laughed until they were weak and watery-eyed as they listened.
Afterward, because Pink implored them and made a mystery of it, they invited Miguel to take a hand in a long-winded game—rather, a series of games—of seven-up, while his chaps hung to dry upon a willow by the creek bank—or so he believed.
The chaps, however, were up in the white-house kitchen, where were also the reek of scorched hair and the laughing expostulations of the Little Doctor and the boyish titter of Pink and Irish, who were curling laboriously the chaps of Miguel with the curling tongs of the Little Doctor and those of the Countess besides.
“It's a shame, and I just hope Miguel thrashes you both for it,” the Little Doctor told them more than once; but she laughed, nevertheless, and showed Pink how to give the twist which made of each lock a corkscrew ringlet. The Countess stopped, with her dishcloth dangling from one red, bony hand, while she looked. “You boys couldn't sleep nights if you didn't pester the life outa somebody,” she scolded. “Seems to me I'd friz them diamonds, if I was goin' to be mean enough to do anything.”