“I’m sorry if I’ve misjudged you. Let’s just forget it. You don’t know how much relieved I feel.”
“I feel better, too,” said Hal. “Things are going to take a decidedly new turn.”
“It’s fine to hear you say that!” exclaimed the doctor, almost convinced that at last he had struck a human stratum in the boy’s heart. “I can take my after-dinner nap with a great deal easier mind now. Good-by.”
He limped into the house, not perhaps fully confident of Hal, but at any rate more inclined to believe him amenable to reason. Hal, peering after him, whispered a terrific blasphemy under his breath.
“You damned buttinsky!” he growled, black with passion. “There’s something coming to you, too. Something you’ll get, by God, or I’m no man!”
He got up, and—silently in his rubber-soled shoes—walked around the porch to the end of it, then stepped down into the grass and crept along by the house. Under the doctor’s window he stood, listening acutely. Just what the doctor was doing he must by all means know. Ezra was safe enough. From the kitchen drifted song:
“Rolling Rio,
To my rolling Rio Grande!
Hooray, you rolling Rio!
So fare ye well, my bonny young girls,
For I’m bound to the Rio Grande!”
Hal nodded as he heard the springs of the doctor’s bed creak, and knew the old man had really laid down for his mid-afternoon nap.
“It’s working fine,” said he. “Gramp’s gone, Ezra’s good for half an hour on ‘Rio Grande,’ and the doc’s turned in. Looks like a curse was sticking to me, doesn’t it? Not much! Nothing like that can stick to me!”