“Sure, I will, Squatty,” said Paul, heartily shaking his hand. “I’m not as tired as I was.”
He swung himself on his pony and loped off after the foreman’s horse, leaving a group behind him dumb with mingled surprise and admiration. It was Molly who broke the impressive silence.
“Say, ‘Squatty,’ we’re always learning some, ain’t we?” she said with a grin.
With grave deliberation “Squatty” paused to eject a stream of tobacco juice, wiped his lips carefully with the back of his hand, and made reply, “Molly, some fools git beyond the learnin’ age. You and I ain’t that kind of fool.” And from that hour and for many a long year, among Paul’s most stalwart champions “Squatty” Hayes was reckoned in the first rank.
There was no further reference to the incident among the cowboys, for “Squatty” was fierce in the “rough and tumble,” but there was no more “ridin’ of the kid” in the McConnell bunch.
CHAPTER XX
From that day on Paul seemed to become more a member of the household than simply one of “the bunch.” In the McConnell living-room stood a really fine piano which the Irishman had taken off the hands of a young Englishman who had been called home and had in reckless haste sold everything and gone. Once Paul had been introduced to the instrument it became the regular custom that after the boys had “fed up and washed up” an invitation would come down to the bunk house, delivered in person as a rule by Molly, in something like the following terms, “Ma wants you to come up and play some music for us, Paul. The rest of you kids can come up too if you like.” With which invitation the boys would be meekly content. Thus night after night it was their custom to sit entranced, all unconscious of the flight of time, under the weird witchery that flowed from those long, sinewy fingers while Paul wandered at will from “Ole Dan Tucker,” “Money Musk,” and “Turkey in the Straw” to “The Moonlight” or a Bach fugue, or, best of all in Molly’s estimation, one of Paul’s own improvisations. One thing, however, Paul always insisted upon, and in this he was loyally backed up by “the bunch,” that Molly must first play one of her pieces, “Silvery Waves,” “Woodland Echoes,” “Clayton’s Grand March,” or, by special request, “The Maiden’s Prayer.” Happy evenings these were to them all: to Paul, revelling once more in the long-lost joy of communing with the great masters of music, and in renewing memories of his boyhood years; to the boys; and to Pa and Ma McConnell, keeping time with foot and hand to rollicking reel and jig which, as nothing else could, brought back with almost painful reality the good old times in old Ontario or Nova Scotia or in a very humble cabin on “the dear ould sod beyant the sea”; and to Molly, sitting with wide blue eyes staring into space, her heart rocked with mingled emotions whose meaning she could not fathom.
But these nights, as all nights will, passed with the passing summer, and with the approach of winter new plans had to be made.
One day when the snow began to fly and the cowboys were beginning “to strike for the bright lights,” there to relieve themselves of their summer’s pay that burned like molten metal in their pockets, McConnell, after a long and serious conversation with his shrewd and motherly spouse, lured his “kid cow-puncher” into his private den, to have “a little chaw about things.”
“Got any plans for the winter, Paul?” he asked abruptly, after exhausting such subjects of conversation as were of mutual knowledge to them.