“Where’s yo’ hawss, Reddy?” inquired a tall young man, who had appeared silently in the doorway of the bunkhouse.
Reddy pinked violently. “I had an accident, Denver,” he explained. “This lady yere she—”
“Scooped y’u right off yore hawss. Y’u don’t say,” sympathized Mac so breathlessly that even Reddy joined in the chorus of laughter that went up at his expense.
The young woman thought to make it easy for him, and suggested an explanation.
“His horse isn’t used to automobiles, and so when it met this one—”
“I got off,” interposed Reddy hastily, displaying a complexion like a boiled beet.
“He got off,” Mac explained gravely to the increasing audience.
Denver nodded with an imperturbable face. “He got off.”
Mac introduced Miss Messiter to such of her employés as were on hand. “Shake hands with Miss Messiter, Missou,” was the formula, the name alone varying to suit the embarrassed gentlemen in leathers. Each of them in turn presented a huge hand, in which her little one disappeared for the time, and was sawed up and down in the air like a pump-handle. Yet if she was amused she did not show it; and her pleasure at meeting the simple, elemental products of the plains outweighed a great deal her sense of the ludicrous.
“How are your patients getting along?” she presently asked of her foreman.