"Well, you'll have to learn to look like you knew where it grew on bushes," Emerson told him, grinning.
"I can see you've chosen me for a nice lazy job."
"Anything but that, son. You don't want to make any mistake about this thing. Brad Steelman's goin' to fight like a son-of-a-gun. He'll strike at our credit and at our market and at our means of transportation. He'll fight twenty-four hours of the day, and he's the slickest, crookedest gray wolf that ever skulked over the range."
The foreman of the D Bar Lazy R came in after supper for a conference with his boss. He and Crawford got their heads together in the sitting-room and the young people gravitated out to the porch. Joyce pressed Dave into service to help her water the roses, and Keith hung around in order to be near Dave. Occasionally he asked questions irrelevant to the conversation. These were embarrassing or not as it happened.
Joyce delivered a little lecture on the culture of roses, not because she considered herself an authority, but because her guest's conversation was mostly of the monosyllabic order. He was not awkward or self-conscious; rather a man given to silence.
"Say, Mr. Sanders, how does it feel to be wounded?" Keith blurted out.
"You mustn't ask personal questions, Keith," his sister told him.
"Oh! Well, I already ast this one?" the boy suggested ingenuously.
"Don't know, Keith," answered the young man. "I never was really wounded. If you mean this scratch in the shoulder, I hardly felt it at all till afterward."
"Golly! I'll bet I wouldn't tackle a feller shootin' at me the way that
Miller was at you," the youngster commented in naïve admiration.