"What did you say?" The snapped question came from Sam Gallegher, and his entry evidently was most unexpected.
"Nawthin' that amounts to anything," murmured the reddish puncher, and he slumped back in his chair, pretending an interest in the bottom layer of a pie crust that he previously had scorned.
Flame straightened in her chair. They were holding out on her, the whole bunch of them, including her father. They had his prize horse in the stable and they had him somewhere about, and they were afraid to tell her! Of all that she was convinced. She realized that she had just a moment in which to decide, and in that moment she decided to play them at their own game.
"Let's have 'The Cowboy's Dream,' Firecracker," put in her father. "We all get in strong on the chorus of that old-timer."
Flame pushed back her chair, but did not rise, for there was no formality about the Lazy G's after-supper "sing." Flinging one khaki-covered knee over the other she began in a contralto as clear as a day in June:
"Last night as I lay on the prairie,
And looked at the stars in the sky,
I wondered if ever a cowboy
Would drift to that sweet by and by."
And then the outfit, with bass, tenor and unidentified squalls, swung into the decidedly repetitious chorus:
"Roll on, roll on;
Roll on, little doggies, roll on, roll on.
Roll on, roll on:
Roll on, little doggies, roll on."
As though she thought they needed the instruction she came right back at them with the dogmatic lines of a second verse, in which a dim narrow trail leads to the bright, happy region; but a broad one to perdition was "posted and blazed all the way." She sang, between their lusty roll-ons, of the "great round-up," where cowboys, like doggies, were gathered to be marked by the Riders of Judgment, and on to the final warning:
"They say He will never forget you,
That He knows every action and look;
So, for safety you'd better get branded,
Have your name in the great Tally Book."