Pete's reply was lost in the shuffle of feet as the men rose and shook hands with him, asking him a dozen questions in as many seconds, asserting that he was looking fine, and generally behaving like a crowd of schoolboys, as they welcomed him to their midst again.
Pete sat in the absent Bill Haskins's place. And "You must 'a' knowed he was coming" asserted Avery. "Bill is over to the line shack."
"I got a letter," asserted Ma Bailey mysteriously.
"And you jest said nothin' and sprung him on us! Well, Ma, you sure fooled me," said Andy, grinning.
"You go 'long." Mrs. Bailey smiled at Andy, who had earned her forgiveness by crediting her—rather wisely—with having originated the surprise.
They were chatting and joking when Bill Haskins appeared in the door-way, his hand wrapped in a handkerchief.
Ma Bailey glared at him over her spectacles. "Got any stickin'-plaster?" he asked plaintively, as though he had committed some misdemeanor. She rose and placed a plate and chair for him as he shook hands with Pete, led him to the kitchen and inspected and bandaged his hand, which he had jagged on a wire gate, and finally reinstated him at the table, where he proved himself quite as efficient as most men are with two hands. "Give Bill all the coffee he wants and plenty stickin'-plaster, and I reckon he never would do no work," suggested Hank Barley.
Bill Haskins grinned good-naturedly. "I see Pete's got back," he ventured, as a sort of mild intimation that there were other subjects worth discussing. He accompanied this brilliant observation by a modest request for another cup of coffee, his fourth. The men rose, leaving Bill engaged in his favorite indoor pastime, and intimated that Pete should go with them. But Ma Bailey would not bear of it. Pete was going to help her with the dishes. Andy could go, however, and Bill Haskins, as soon as he was convinced that the coffee-pot was empty. Ma Bailey's chief interest in life at the moment was to get the dishes put away, the men out of the way, and Pete in the most comfortable rocking-chair in the room, that she might hear his account of how it all happened.
And Pete told her—omitting no circumstance, albeit he did not accentuate that part of his recital having to do with Doris Gray, merely mentioning her as "that little gray-eyed nurse in El Paso"—and in such an offhand manner that Ma Bailey began to suspect that Pete was keeping something to himself. Finally, by a series of cross-questioning, comment, and sympathetic concurrence, she arrived at the feminine conclusion that the gray-eyed nurse in El Paso had set her cap for Pete—of course Pete was innocent of any such adjustment of headgear—to substantiate which she rose, and, stepping to the bedroom, returned with the letter which had caused her so much speculation as to who was writing to Pete, and why the letter had been directed to the Concho.
Pete glanced at the letter, and thanked Ma Bailey as he tucked it in his pocket.