They rode in silence for a few minutes. Then, “Mabel is a nice, pretty name,” said the child, thoughtfully. “I think it’s a nicer name than Edna ... Edna,” he added, after an instant of burdened silence, “is my cousin’s name....”
“I see,” said the Ranger. “Now, do you think you would care to have Mabel walk just a trifle faster?”
“Would he—stop again if I—if I didn’t care for it?”
“Instantly, when you pull on the reins and say ‘whoa,’ firmly and decisively. It’s just like putting on a brake, you know. All set?” He chirruped to Mabel who changed from a walk to a languid trot.
At once, involuntarily, the Scout clung to his pommel as to the Rock of Ages, but after a shamed moment he let go of it and sat up again.
“Snappy work!” said the Ranger, cordially, once more.
“I g-guess,” said Elmer Bunty, a faint and furtive pink coming into his small face, speaking jerkily with the motion of the clumsy old horse, “I g-guess Edna c-couldn’t c-call me ’Fraid-Cat if she s-saw me now!”
There was the most astonishing amount of satisfaction, Dean Wolcott was to discover, to be derived from the presence of an admittedly inferior and worshipful companion. Never before had he been looked up to in this fashion. He had been quite frank in writing to his San Francisco friend, but he had not known, then, how much he wanted the qualities he was ordering. A Wolcott among Wolcotts, he had been treated as one of them, of course; a Wolcott had also been treated like a Wolcott at Dos Pozos but in a very different sense indeed; to Elmer Bunty he was the final word in horsemanship, in marksmanship, in woodcraft, in courage and wide wisdom. The young man, holding himself up to his own hearty mirth, nevertheless enjoyed it shamelessly. One thing he had not counted upon, however, was his immediate fondness for the boy; it was odd that so unbeautiful and unpromising a youth should seem to dive headlong into his affections, but this was exactly what he had done. It was a positive pleasure to feed him until his pallid skin grew visibly more taut, to tuck him up at night with an extra blanket pulled high about his meager neck, to guide and guard him in his timid steps forward into a red-blooded world.
Rusty, the Airedale, adopted him at once. Elmer had never had a dog; his aunt disliked and disapproved of them on sound, economic principles and held, quite reasonably, that they made extra work and “dirtied up a house,” and he had not known how to go about the business of conciliating Rusty, but he had not needed to know; Rusty had known for both of them. He still treated the new Ranger with a grudging civility, but the Scout was taken into his heart on the second day. He taught him to play; he unlocked starved chambers in his flat little chest, and in the short evenings when Dean Wolcott read aloud from stout and hearty boy-books he charged contentedly beside the lad, his chin on the small sharp knee.