With the relaxing of her fingers she eased him from her so that she could look from one to the other.
“Two bonnie, bonnie men. Good-by, bonnie men. Good-by, Red Cloud.”
In the pause, they waited, while the doctor bared her arm for the needle.
“Sleepy, sleepy,” she twittered in mimicry of drowsy birds. “I am ready, doctor. Stretch the skin tight, first. You know I don’t like to be hurt.—Hold me tight, Dick.”
Robinson, receiving the eye permission from Dick, easily and quickly thrust the needle through the stretched skin, with steady hand sank the piston home, and with the ball of the finger soothingly rubbed the morphine into circulation.
“Sleepy, sleepy, boo’ful sleepy,” she murmured drowsily, after a time.
Semi-consciously she half-turned on her side, curved her free arm on the pillow and nestled her head on it, and drew her body up in nestling curves in the way Dick knew she loved to sleep.
After a long time, she sighed faintly, and began so easily to go that she was gone before they guessed. From without, the twittering of the canaries bathing in the fountain penetrated the silence of the room, and from afar came the trumpeting of Mountain Lad and the silver whinny of the Fotherington Princess.
THE END