"Clarence!" she expostulated, but he waved her to silence with an imperious hand.
"Quickest way to tell the story, Nell—that's my pæan of victory. Sleep? Slept like a night watchman. Eat? I debauched myself with the rowdiest sort of food every chance I got—fried bacon, boiled beans, baking-powder biscuit, black coffee that would bite your finger off—couldn't get enough; smoked when I wasn't eating or sleeping; drank raw whisky, too—whisky that would etch copper. Work? I worked harder than a Coney Island piano player, fell over asleep at night and got up asleep in the morning—when they kicked me the third time. And I galloped up and down cliffs after runaway steers where I wouldn't have crawled on my hands and knees two weeks before. And now that whole bunch of boys treat me like one of themselves. I found out they called me 'Willie Four-eyes' when I first came here. Now they call me 'Doc,' as friendly as you can imagine, and Buck Devlin told me last night I could ride a streak of lightning with the back cinch busted, if I tried."
He broke off to light the evil pipe ostentatiously, while she watched him, open eyed, not yet equal to speech.
"Now run in like a good girl and see if Ma Pierce has plenty of fragments from the noonday feast. Anything at all—I could eat a deer hide with the hair on."
Wavering incredulously, she left to do his bidding. As he led his horse around to the corral he roared a snatch from Buck Devlin's favorite ballad, with an excellent imitation of the cowboy manner:
"Oh, bur-ree me not on the lone prai-ree-e—"
After he had eaten he slouched into a hammock on the veranda with extravagant groans of repletion, and again lighted his pipe. His sister promptly removed her chair beyond the line of its baleful emanations.
"Well, Sis," he began, "that trip sure did for me good and plenty. Me for the high country uninterrupted hereafter!"
She regarded him with an amused smile.
"I'm so glad, dear, about the health. It's a miracle, but don't overdo it, don't attempt everything at once. And the trip 'sure' seems to have 'done' you in another way—how is it—'good and plenty'? You walk like a cowboy and talk and sing and act generally like one——"