as strong for him.
Bu-lieve me, Helen Blazes, I'm wise. You're wishing a goat would get
lost--now, while the moon's workin' steady!"

"Oh, beat it, Vic! I've got work to do, if you haven't." And to prove it,
Helen May began to type at her best speed.

Vic languidly removed himself from the door jamb and with a parting "I
should bibble," started back to his goats, which he had refused to graze
outside the Basin as Holman Sommers advised. Helen May began valiantly to
struggle with the fine, symmetrical, but almost unreadable chirography of
the man of many words. She succeeded in transcribing the human polyp
properly lithified and correctly constituting the strata of the
psychozoic age, when Vic stuck his head in at the door again.

"From the des-urt he comes to thee-ee-ee,
And he's got a dog for thee to see-ee."

He paraphrased mockingly, going down to that terrifically deep-sea bass
note of a boy whose voice is changing.

Helen May threw her eraser at him and missed. It went hurtling out into
the yard and struck Starr on the point of the jaw, as he was riding up to
the cabin.

Whereat Vic gave a brazenly exultant whoop and rushed off to his goats,
bellowing raucously:

"When you wore a too-lup, a sweet yellow too-lup
'N I wore a big red ro-o-ose--"

and looking back frequently in a half curious, half wistful way. Vic, if
you will stop to think of it, had been transplanted rather suddenly from
the midst of many happy-go-lucky companions to an isolation lightened
only by a mere sister's vicarious comradeship. If he yearned secretly for
a share of Starr's interest, surely no one can blame him; but that he
should voluntarily remove himself from Starr's presence in the belief
that he had come to see Helen May exclusively, proves that Vic had the
makings of a hero.

Starr dismounted and picked up the eraser from under the investigative
nose of a coarse-haired, ugly, brown and black dog that had been
following Rabbit's heels. He took the eraser to Helen May, standing
embarrassed in the doorway, and the dog followed and sniffed first her
slipper toes and then her hands, which she held out to it ingratiatingly;
after which appraisement the dog waggled its stub of a tail in token of
his friendliness.

"If you was a Mexican he'd a showed you his teeth," Starr observed
pridefully. "How are you, after your jaunt the other night?"

"Just fine," Helen May testified graciously. It just happened (or had it
just happened?)