"I can assure you, Mr. Stamford," said Mrs. Aikens, "that the H-Lazy Z will be your debtor as long as you can stay. Jim will say the same."
But Jim did not say the same—at least not then. Though Bean Slade and the cook had arrived from the cook-house, Cockney bore the brunt of the kitchen fire. He remained bent over it, blowing and watching, until the flame burned bright.
"There isn't a ranch in the country closed to strangers at any time," he said, slowly rising from his knees and bending to brush them off.
A sensible embarrassment filled the room. Stamford felt the chill of it, but the look he surprised on Mary Aikens' face prompted him to ignore it.
"Of course there's danger of a tenderfoot out-Westing the West when he gets started," he said lightly.
"Don't worry," said Cockney, more genially. "We'll hold you to the conventions."
Stamford was indignant inwardly. Though he had made himself Cockney's guest to prove his faith in his host justified, he felt a twinge of shame at accepting such lukewarm hospitality.
"You know, Mary, I thought I noticed a difference in the last issue of the Journal." Cockney's spirits were unaccountably rising. "It seemed newsier, better written."
"I suppose," said Stamford, "like an old employer of mine, you consider editors necessary evils to justify the existence of the advertising man. Smith will get along all right with the Journal. I figured that an anæmic paper for a few weeks is better than a dead editor for a long time—at least from my point of view. In my efforts to uplift Western journalism I seem to have pitted a puny constitution against a vigorous tradition that all stomachs look alike to the Provincial. This little body was beginning to buck."
Mary Aikens had brought from town another visitor, a small fox-terrier that Cockney had picked up somewhere, he did not remember where. He only knew that when he woke one morning he was forty-seven dollars out and a fox-terrier in. Mary was delighted. It surprised her that she had not thought of it before. Cockney was less enthusiastic. He was oppressed with sundry misgivings of the manner in which he had come by the dog, and out there on the Red Deer was no place for a miserable little creature no decent coyote would make two bites of.